


Earthtamer

by EndoplasmicPanda



Category: The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Blade Runner Fusion, Alternate Universe - Cyberpunk, Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Identity Issues, Legend of Zelda AU, Legend of Zelda References, M/M, Or Voltron for that matter, Panic Attacks, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild AU, This AU is ridiculous but trust me it works, You don't need to be familiar with BOTW to read this fic!, breath of the wild AU, so many Legend of Zelda References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-01
Updated: 2018-09-01
Packaged: 2019-07-05 04:56:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,370
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15856656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EndoplasmicPanda/pseuds/EndoplasmicPanda
Summary: The world hadn't ended in ten thousand years, but Keith doesn't know that. All Keith knows is that everything is on fire, the knife on his hip is whispering in his ear, and the one-armed man they find buried in the woods is the key to saving them all.(A Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild crossover. Knowledge of BOTW not required to read this fic!)The building rattled.It was a low hum at first, like the purr of another bladed plane. The windows twitched in their frames, and the lights outside, dancing around in neon shells, performed ballet on the surface of Keith's thin, moth-eaten curtains.Everything went black."Move,"the knife said.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> My contribution to the [**Sheith Big Bang**](https://sheithbigbang.tumblr.com/) for 2018!! Hope you enjoy.

* * *

 

His knife was talking to him again.

The rumble of a bladed plane rattled the thin glass of his apartment building, smashed his bedframe against the piecemeal drywall and sent the room’s electronics into a flickering mess. His neighbor’s alarm system, run on a hair trigger, whooped out an anxious whine, and when the plane passed by, all flashing lights and glowing engines, it barked like an automated dog.

Keith pried his face off his pillow and gave the glow of his drawn curtains a hard stare.

He sighed, pressed his cheek into the thin fabric, tried to ignore the way the synthetic foam cut awkward, haloed trenches into his skin. It was nearing the end of the month – he would need to replace them again soon.

The plane dipped behind another high-rise building, and Keith’s room sank back into the low, perpetual glow that Gerudo City spat out against his walls like day-old chewing tobacco. He rolled over, content to suffer through another half an hour of sleep before the housemaster came through and kicked him out for the day, but the room hadn’t gone quiet – not like he had expected it to.

_ “Move,”  _ something said.

Keith blinked. He sat up in bed, let the sheets that weren’t his tumble down his chest and pool across a bed that wasn’t his, either. The room was empty. He’d made sure of that before.

_ “Move,” _ something said again. It was coming from the corner, where his old knapsack lay tangled with his clothes.

Keith shot out of bed, his bare feet cutting against the untreated wooden floorboards. He winced when a splinter cut through his toe, but ignored it in favor of digging through his bag.

He threw aside an old lighter, a silicon writing pen, an old carton of breath mints, and two days of stale clothes before he found what he was praying he wouldn’t.

His knife was a gift from his father – a man he’d known for hardly a spark of his childhood. “A family heirloom,” the man had said. “A treasure.” And then he’d gone and gotten himself killed.

The knife was glowing when Keith pulled it out – and that was never a good sign. The first time had been the day of the great East Side Fire, and the second time was before a street sweeper nearly caught him up in its blades in the early years when he was still sleeping beside warm dumpsters.

“Shit,” he whispered. He held it in his hand; the purple-black glow cast dull shadows across his chest.

“ _ Move,” _ it said again. Keith shivered.

He looked back out of his window, grumbled under his breath, and blindly reached for his clothes with his free hand. He wasn’t about to take any chances – and he still had another twenty minutes.

The building rattled again.

It was a low hum at first, like the purr of another bladed plane. The windows twitched in their frames, and the lights outside, dancing around in neon shells, performed ballet on the surface of his thin, moth-eaten curtains.

Everything went black.

It was strange – Keith had never seen the dark before. Only when he slammed his eyelids shut and pressed his face into the surface of his mattress did the feeling come – but it was fake and disappointing and nothing like what he’d hoped. But darkness,  _ real _ darkness, was nothing like his imagination conjured up.

He heard a murmur from outside his window, like the hiss of a steam pipe, or the whine of shifting metal. When he held his breath and let his heartbeat quiet, he realized that’s precisely what he was hearing. The building was swaying.

_ “Move,” _ the knife said again. This time, Keith chased the dread.

His clothes went on in a hurried mess, catching over his mop of greasy black hair and pinching at his scalp when some of it was pulled away with the jagged metal zipper of his jacket. He slipped his shoes over his last pair of well-worn socks, threw his bag over his shoulder, and began to feel his way toward his door when the lights came back on again.

The city burst back to life. The ventilation systems whined up to speed, and his neighbor’s alarm system shrilled. For a moment, everything evened out again, and the city quieted, as if taking a deep breath. Keith still felt uneasy.

His door opened before he could get to it, blown aside by the force of his housemaster, a portly woman with a disposition for the drab.

“What the hell’s going on, Kogane?” she shouted at him, loose, untied hair bouncing around her face. She’d forgotten to tie it in a bun today like she always did. Her clothes were always some level of well-worn and grey – an old blouse and off-color work pants that were pulled under a pair of thigh-high leather boots – but today, she looked ragged and dirty.

Scared, even. Keith would never say that to her face, though.

He blinked, looked past her shoulder. “What makes you think I know?”

The building shook again.

“Whenever things like this happen, it’s usually you at the center of it all,” she snarled, jutting a chubby finger in his direction. “You know, I have half a mind to demote you to daytime sleeping privileges. Gods know there are enough people clamoring for the right to sleep at  _ night _ like respectable members of society.”

Keith tightened the straps on his bag, kicked the toe of his shoe against the wood floor until it settled against his heel the way it was supposed to. “You could always just give this place to me full-time,” he said, shrugging. The path behind her was clear; he’d have a straight shot outside if he could get past. “It’s bad enough having to share it with three other people.”

The housemaster narrowed her eyes. “Don’t push your luck, kid.”

_ “Move,”  _ the knife said.

The power cut out again.

Keith took his chances, ducking underneath his housemaster’s arm and bolting for the exit. The building started shaking the moment his feet touched the first flight of stairs, and by the time he burst out onto the first floor, breath heaving and chest thumping, his apartment complex was waving in the wind like a leaf.

The entire city was screaming. Darkness hadn’t fallen in Gerudo City for nearly two millennia – and none of those living in the metropolis Keith was familiar with had ever seen it for themselves. People ran down the streets like rabid animals. Fires were growing in storefronts, looted by mobs. Automobiles jutted out of building foundations.

Keith let out a slow, calming breath, taking a few shaky steps into the fray. He blinked, once, twice, let his eyes adjust to the darkness; he turned just in time to catch a man sprinting down the street, nearly crashing into him.

“What’s going on?” Keith asked, grabbing him by the arm before he could keep running.

“The power plant,” he breathed, and even in the dim light, Keith could see the whites of his eyes flash cold. “It just…”

An explosion rocked the far street corner, and bright-hot light bit into the darkness like magma from Mount Maliro.

More screaming. It sounded like windchimes. Keith shuddered.

“Run,” the man he was holding muttered, twisting out of Keith’s grip and stumbling over himself on the asphalt. “Run!”

The low hum of a bladed plane drifted overhead, and Keith looked up just as one of its wings cut into the side of a building –  _ his _ building, he realized – and lit up the side in a sea of sparks. It tipped forward, wing jutting from the glass, and fell, engines whirring slower and slower and slower and—

Keith ducked into an alleyway when it struck the ground, and the air twisted from the shock. Windows shattered, and when Keith took a step forward to run away, he found that the ground had moved up to meet him, catching his foot and tossing him down beside a pile of overturned garbage cans.

_ “Move,” _ the knife said.

Keith clenched his jaw, hissing air through the gaps in his teeth and stumbling upright again. He looked up. The horizon was glowing orange.

It wasn’t daytime – he still had another fifteen minutes before the first hints of dawn would appear. No; he was looking to the south, toward the power station.

It was on fire.

“ _ Move _ ,” the knife said. “ _ Move!” _

Keith gripped his bag to his chest, pushed the sheathed blade into a loop on his belt and  _ ran _ .

The ground vibrated again, and this time, Keith swore he could hear the core of the earth roar.

He passed building after building, sprinting to the north, keeping the rapidly growing sea of red-hot ash at his back. He heard more explosions, felt more tremors, but nothing else cut through the sounds of Gerudo City - the sound of all thirteen million citizens crying out like the jingle of faraway bells.

He had just set his sights on the city’s outer wall when the skyscrapers began to fall.

* * *

Shiro spent his whole life in the mines. It was all he knew.

He was a tall man, built like a tank, and fit himself into the earth like rainwater into loose soil. He worked hard, suffered through the grueling heat of sub-volcanic terrain, and brought home just enough money to keep himself fed and his modest home comfortable.

Iron was in short supply. The massive city that stretched over much of the western desert made sure of it. Shiro hadn’t seen an ore other than iron in over four years, but that wasn’t for lack of trying – iron was all anyone wanted.

Or so he thought.

“It’s why I’m reassigning you,” his boss told him, pulling him aside one morning after the long elevator ride down to the main service cage. “You’ve served your purpose here. We need you for something else – something more  _ exclusive.” _

He rubbed his thumb over the tips of his other fingers with a thick grin, and somehow, Shiro knew that there was a chance he would lose a limb.

Reassignment, apparently, meant moving  _ closer _ to Mount Maliro, the volcano that loomed over everything but the tallest skyscrapers in Gerudo City. “You’ll be fine,” he was told before he’d even stepped foot off the train that dumped him at the base. “Maliro’s always been like this.”

Which, in the end, was how he found himself digging through solidified magma near the base of a somewhat inactive volcano, searching for something his boss would only describe as “worth pursuing”. It wasn’t ore. It wasn’t mineral.

Shiro bit his lip and did what he was told, working alongside a mass of others that knew just as little as he did.

At least until the earthquakes started.

* * *

“ _ Move, _ ” the knife said. “ _ Move move move move move—” _

“I  _ am _ moving!” Keith huffed out from between stolen breaths, legs screaming for purchase against the rocky desert cliffside. He pushed himself up against another boulder, begged his gloves not to tear against the sandstone, and free-climbed his way over the ledge onto higher ground. His fingers were frozen and blue, achy at the tips to the point where Keith could barely feel them anymore.

Another tremor shook the desert. They seemed to be growing in strength with each hour. Keith forced himself not to look back.

The sun was rising to his right, cutting over the hulking silhouette of Mount Maliro. He still had another day’s worth of travel before he was out from underneath the imposing, daunting presence of Gerudo City, but each of his hasty footsteps did little to put distance between himself and whatever was left of his home.

The Gerudo desert was framed on the northern side by a wall of frozen mountains, snow-swept and picture perfect. From the roofs of the high-rise skyscrapers where powerful oligarchs held their cocktail parties and scowled down at the rest of the city, the mountains looked like the buttresses of a massive fortress - a barrier that kept the sickness of the rest of Zitara out. But to Keith, every time he stole a glance out the narrow windows of buildings he shouldn’t’ve been in, all he saw was freedom.

He pulled himself up another wall, let his breath cut out against the rock in sharp bursts. Easier said than done.

The ground shook with another tremor, and he gripped whatever he could to ride it out. Overhead, a swarm of bladed planes blitzed past him, engines screaming at full-power and desert soot coating their underbellies like rust.

They were flying  _ away _ from Gerudo City.

Keith shivered, pulling his jacket closer around his chest. His bag had fallen out of his grasp long ago - another casualty of Gerudo City’s massacre. At his hip, his knife seeped warmth like a leaky faucet, and it dripped down his leg into an uncomfortable pool at his ankle. It would have been a calming presence – a reminder of his mortality – if that muted sensation of warmth hadn’t felt so much like blood.

Ahead, the desert faded to sharper rocks and more jagged cliff faces. Keith could count the winding paths up the slopes on one hand, and none of them looked easy enough to climb. His stomach growled underneath where his hands gripped his jacket into his skin.

One step. Another. Keith felt his shoes dig trenches into the sand underneath the snow with each shaky breath. His hair whipped across his face in broad strokes, like empty paintbrushes on a finished canvas.

His eyes drooped closed. Another step. Another. The grip on his jacket loosened. How long had he been climbing? The sun was high in the sky; wasn’t it morning?

The rocks leveled out, leaving a ledge of unblemished snow large enough for a bladed plane to land. The sky was spinning, and the high shadows of the mountains above him swam in the sea of color that flooded Keith’s vision.

And then the flesh of his cheek was cutting a divot in the snow.

He had to get up. He had to move. To where, he wasn’t entirely sure. There wasn’t much for him in the wilderness of Zitara, but there wasn’t much for him  _ anywhere _ . His body ached, stomach rumbling, and--

A flash of orange-red light lit up the mountainside, and the ground shook again. Keith didn’t bother to move, even when he felt the light pattering of loosened rock dust against the exposed back of his jacket. Gerudo had fallen. That much was obvious – something had shattered in the infrastructure of the city and now it was a sea of fire and ash. Maybe it was the earthquakes. Maybe it was something else.

Keith laid there, shielding his eyes with his arm, waiting for the light to fade again.

But it didn’t.

Something whipped at his hair, tossed it around his neck like loose silk. The snow gathering around his sunken eyelids flurried away, caught in a vortex of wind. The air warmed with each slow, slow beat of Keith's heart, until his jacket lay heavy and unwanted on his shoulders, and the air in his lungs was soothing, not cold.

He would have rolled over, would have stood to defend himself, but his eyes felt like locked doors and his limbs like solid lead.

All he could think of, watching the iron-lined bladed plane descend over his motionless body through the haze of his semi-closed eyelids, was that his knife had finally gone quiet again.

* * *

Shiro had never been so claustrophobic in his life.

There was a difference between mining for ore, and mining for something else, and that difference came in the shape of the tunnels carved for the workers to scuttle through like termites.

The elevator rumbled down the main shaft like the whistle of a thunderstorm, creaking and lurching and stuttering with each meter of solid stone that passed Shiro's eyes. It came to a halt at the bottom of the tunnel in a crash, and the rickety old steel doors slid apart like the screeching of an out-of-tune orchestra.

The other workers - of which there were few - unfolded themselves from the confines of the elevator and filed into the narrow cave that stretched forward into the earth like a fissure between two plates.

"Alright, you slack-jawed sacks of shit!" the boss called out from the front of the line. "Time to start making that hard-earned money you seem to feel like you have some claim of!"

The air was stale. The tunnel was dark. There was barely enough room to stand two-abreast, let alone breathe, and Shiro had to hold his hand, pinching between the webbing of skin above his thumb until the nausea pooling at the pit of his gut stopped building like a clogged pipe.

"Lights on!" the boss said, and each miner, hands already blackened and dusty from the soot, reached up to flick on the headlamps cutting rivets into the skin of their scalps.

"Alright, pick a direction and start digging!"

The miner to Shiro’s left keeled over, emptying the contents of his stomach across the surface of volcanic rock at his feet.

The boss stumbled by, brushing past the others and slamming into Shiro’s back when his foot slipped on the sick. “What the hell?” he barked, greasy hair glistening in the haze of black soot and lamplight. “Puke on your own time!” He shoved a hammer and chisel into the man’s hands. “Get to work!”

And so it went for two days: Shiro carved his mark into the hidden world underneath Mount Maliro, steel pick cutting stone like the crash of shattering glass. As more rock fell away, pulled to the surface by another legion of helmeted miners, they took with them the claustrophobia, and after the evening of the first day, Shiro could no longer smell the rotten stench of fermenting sick at the beginning of his tunnel entrance. 

But two days passed, and Shiro’s time down under ended with the striking of something that was not, as it happened, stone at all.

* * *

Keith woke with a start, lurching upright with a surge of pain and muscle and starry-eyed blur. The ringing in his ears roared like the winds at the top of the tallest Gerudo City skyscraper, and the ache in his limbs felt like phantom pinpricks - the faintest tickling of a ghost's touch.

His heart thundered in his chest, stuttering along at an asymmetric clip. He counted out one heartbeat, then two, then waited for the third and that one came, too. His breathing stilled. His eyesight came back. The needles in his arms turned to staves, and the staves turned to shards of poisoned steel.

Keith grunted and fell back onto... wherever it was he happened to be. The room was dark, and the faint stream of sunlight from the far window drifted from one side of Keith's cot to the other. He felt the sway of movement, the lurch of motion, and relaxed enough to let his body slide across the rough fabric.

So he was on a bladed plane of some kind - a vessel. At least he wasn't freezing to death in the wilderness anymore.

Sunlight burst into the room like a breached dam. The whisk-whir of an electronic door rattled between Keith's ears, and then rattled again when the door closed a moment later, stealing back the light and throwing the room into familiar darkness.

Keith groaned, throwing a weak arm over his eyes and turning away. Someone had come in, hadn't they?

"So you're awake, then," came that someone's voice. "My, you had me quite worried. With all the action going on in the desert, I was worried the one person I managed to save had fallen, too."

It was a woman's voice - clipped short and high and with an air of upper class to it that sent the bones underneath Keith's skin frozen stiff.

"Who are you?" he managed to spit out from between chapped lips, head still turned toward the wall.

There was only one reason high class folk spoke to Keith, and that was because they, without fail, wanted something from him they didn't already have. Was it his father? Was it his time?

His knife?

He was too familiar with the punishment of fighting back to do much more than stiffen up and wait for his heart to calm down again.

But the woman just tutted and turned away, flipping on a light switch. The shadows in the room faded to the dull, warm glow of a fake light. "I should ask the same of you, you know," she said. "Wandering around in the highlands like some sort of snow animal. Truly poor planning on your part, I must say."

"I don't know if you noticed," Keith said, "but I didn't have much of an choice."

Silence. Apparently that did the trick; the woman's pause was as stale and unpleasant as the air that hung between them.

"Well, there's not much I could have done about that," she said. Keith heard her step off to the other side of the room, heard her settle down on a cot of her own. The plane hit a brief patch of turbulence, and the frame of Keith's bed rattled against the floorboards. He didn't dare to move.

"Are we flying?" he asked, despite knowing the answer already. It didn't hurt to have validation - maybe part of his brain was still frozen and everything had turned into a bizarre hypothermic fever dream.

"Yes," the woman said.

"Why?" Keith asked.

"Why not?" the woman snipped back.

Despite himself, Keith smiled. Something about her struck him as odd - and odd wasn't necessarily bad. Especially in current times. "I'm Keith," he said, still despite himself, still facing the wall. He let the straining muscles in his legs loosen up, and his body slumped flat against the bed, satisfied at least one barrier had been broken.

"I'm surprised you don't know who I am," the woman said. "You should turn around. I guarantee you'd recognize me."

Keith rolled his eyes. "Well that's just--"

He twisted over, let his eyes slide open into the empty space between him and the other wall, and found himself staring into the fire-blue eyes of the Crown Princess of Zitara.

She was wearing a massive white dress, cut in blue streaks like nighttime clouds split down the middle by shooting stars. Her feet were bare, left victim to the cold of the bladed plane's metal floor panels, and her hair, all three feet of it, was tied up into a messy bun on the top of her head with wiring cable.

Keith fell out of his cot.

"Allura," the woman said, laughing, watching him stumble back upright again. "You can call me Allura. None of that princess nonsense, please, if you can manage it."

Keith swallowed his tongue. "If... what?" A pause. "What are you doing out here?"

The princess - Allura, Keith reminded himself - blinked. "What am I what?"

Keith leaned up onto his knees, let the weak force of inertia carry him back to his cot the next time the bladed plane took a corner. "Well," he said, "for starters, why did you pick me up?" He frowned. "Why were you out there at all? You should've been running away."

Allura's eyes went dark. "I don't run away. I never run away."

It was Keith's turn to blink. "Okay," he said, as though she had told him the weather. "But still."

She pursed her lips, ran a tongue over her teeth. "I was looking for something."

"Looking for what?"

She steadied him with her stare, then pointed at the blade clinging to his hip. "For that," she said.

* * *

There was black, then white, then Shiro didn’t remember much of anything at all.

He remembered swinging his axe, bringing it down and watching the shower of sparks fly against the solid wall of stone  when it chipped against a thin grain of flint. 

Lift, swing, spark. 

Sweat poured down his chest, soaked the thin fabric of his soot-soiled tank top, pooled in the divots of his collarbone and fell into his eyes. He swiped at them with the skin of his biceps, but all it did was blur his vision. 

Lift, swing, spark. 

The task was becoming monotonous, losing its appeal with each clash of metal on  earth . It wasn’t more than another job, Shiro realized, and he sank his frustrations into the next downward fell of his right arm.

Lift, swing, spark.

He’d gone through three picks that afternoon, breaking wooden handles and rewelding joints and splitting metal down the middle in jagged cracks that looked like lightning bolts. He’d pull a new one out of the bin at the entrance, buff the corners with the edge of his shirt, fantasize about the cool breeze breathing above the entrance to the mineshaft hundreds of feet above him. 

But all he felt through the grip on his pick was the creak of his bones, the pattering of crackling steel, and the low groan of the earth as they tore through it in search of unknown treasures.

Lift, swing. 

_ Crack _ .

The world went black. The lights went out. Shadows swallowed the caves, and Shiro heard the sharp whispers of his coworkers from across the mine replace the tinkling of crumbling rock.

Shiro reached forward, dropping his tools and running his hands down the surface of the wall in front of him. The calluses on his fingertips caught along the jagged edges he’d carved; the rock wasn’t warm to the touch, as he had expected, as it had always been.

It was cold. Ice cold. He pulled his hands back to his chest like he’d been stung.

The lights flickered once, twice, went off again. Shiro saw white - a streak of silver sticking out from a gash where his pick had pried away pyrite.

It wasn’t natural. There was something caught between the teeth of the earth.

“Over here!” Shiro called out in the darkness. A low murmur grew from the crowd of miners gathering in the main service tunnel. “I found something! Here!”

The lights came back on, and the miners groaned. Shiro winced and threw up an arm to cover his eyes from the sting of his coworker’s lanterns. 

“What’s going on?” the boss shouted, shoving aside men with his burly, long-sleeved arms. He stopped in front of Shiro’s tunnel, pushed past the man’s outstretched hand.

“Wait,” Shiro said, stepping back to meet him before he made it further inside. “Maybe you shouldn’t--”

“Shouldn’t what?” the man sneered, mustache twitching into a smile of its own. “Pay you? Get the hell out of my way.”

“I’m not sure it’s safe,” Shiro said, but pressed his back against the wall and closed his eyes when the boss squeezed by.

A low whine bubbled up from the rear of the cave, carried by the freshly-carved tunnels. The rocks twitched at Shiro’s feet, and the newly-hung lights, strung from wiring drilled into the ceiling just centimeters from Shiro’s head, danced in the darkness. 

Everyone froze. The boss reached out and cupped the side of the wall, gripped it until his fingertips turned white. The tension in the room lit like a fuse, and the hushed whispers dancing among the miners evaporated. The caves were even darker in silence than they were in the light.

“Earthquake,” someone murmured, making a guess but soon retracting it. More voices joined in. “Earthquake?”

Shiro looked out over the sea of heads, turned back to his boss, saw the whites of his nails spread to the planes of his face. His adam’s apple bobbed up, down, up, down with the dancing of the lights.

A pin dropped.

The crust of the earth leaned in, muttered in Shiro’s ear, kissed his cheek and vanished. A breath caught in his throat.

The rear wall of the cave exploded.

* * *

"We need to find somewhere to land," Allura said, bursting through the cockpit door and marching up to the otherwise empty command chair. It spun around when she approached. "I'm not having this conversation until we're better situated and able to fend for ourselves."

"Fend for ourselves?" Keith asked, stalking behind her, burning a hole into the back of her neck. "What, are you conscripting me into the Royal Army? I'm not some lacky you can send out to get your coffee, so don't talk to me like a subordinate."

Allura sank into her chair, pulled it forward until it was pressed close to the sweeping glass of the bladed plane's windows.

The world was on fire. There was no other way to put it. When Keith approached the side of Allura's chair, he could feel the heat bleeding from beyond the glass.

Rivers of magma stretched hundreds of feet across the charred landscape of Zitara, cutting through burning forests like open wounds. What was left of the trees looked like toothpicks sticking out of the ashen dirt, and the sky was red with ember and flame.

"We're lucky," Allura said, voice low and careful. "This plane has very good ventilation systems. It's able to keep up with the soot in the air so we don't suffocate." She winced. “Hopefully the engines are just as well-designed.”

Keith felt his anger stall and die. "Where are we?" he asked. "What is this?"

"This is the forests just north of the Gerudo Desert," Allura said. The bladed plane drifted past a ragged cliffside, torn in two by the shifting of the earth. "It was a massive earthquake. Nothing like what I've ever seen before. Everything shook, and then the ground began to split, and then..."

She trailed off, and her fingers burned white around where she gripped the bladed plane's controls.

Keith leaned forward, reached out until his forehead clicked against the glass. He reveled in the feeling of heat burning his skin, reveled in the fact that it meant he was still alive and not down there.

"The city," Keith murmured. "I was there when it happened."

Allura swallowed. "Goddess above," she said.

"The power had never gone out in Gerudo City before," he said. "Never. Not once. I'm twenty years old, and I've never seen true darkness."

Allura stared out the window, eyes unfocused on the ruins of their civilization. "I see it now," she said.

* * *

He was moving. He felt it in the sea of his gut.

There was wind pressed against his face and the low groaning sound of his ears popping from changing pressure. The world felt like it stretched out from him on all sides, fell away on the edges like water in an infinity pool. The winds shifted, and he turned with them, drifting through a plume of clouds his mind conjured up from behind his closed eyelids.

Something purred in the back of his mind, rumbled along the length of his spine. He felt calm, then. Protected. Part of him screamed that he shouldn’t be there, should still be buried deep within the trenches of the earth underneath Mount Maliro, but the purring told him otherwise. You’re safe, it said. Safe and alive.

And then he was falling. He couldn’t open his eyes -  _ shouldn’t _ open his eyes - but the feeling was too strong, too fierce to ignore.

But all he saw when he pried them open was the white plume of some beast’s chest and the pool of the earth reaching up, up, up to catch him in a soundless rush.

* * *

"What about there?" Keith said, pointing to an outcropping of rock nestled against a shallow mountainside. The lava, much to their surprise, had kept mostly to the southern regions, leaving the forests of central Zitara untouched. The air was poison, and fires were spreading across the trees like a twisted game of leapfrog, but otherwise, things were calmer. More secure.

"We need to be away from Mount Maliro," Allura said. She cast a short glance up at the mammoth volcano, bubbling lava and gurgling like an infant child. "It's calm now, yes, but ancient legend says..." She coughed. "Well. Let's not get into that right now."

"Not until we've landed," Keith repeated. "Sure. How about a few miles to the west? There's a small clearing on top of a mountain past the plains. Should be big enough for this plane to land."

Allura twisted her hands on the controls, and the bladed plane fell back toward the horizon. "Is it a wooded area?" she asked. "Is there a pond in the center? Full of wonderful wildlife and wild plants?"

Keith raised an eyebrow. "Yeah, actually."

Allura nodded. "I think I know which one you speak of." She gave him a look out of the corner of her eye. "That place is a holy site for the members of the royal family. It's a closely guarded secret." Her voice was less conspiratorial as much as it was curious - intrigued, even. "How in the world did you know it even existed?"

Not the knife, Keith said to himself. Definitely not the knife. "My housemaster. Back in Gerudo City. She always talked about retiring there."

“Ah,” Allura said. “A retirement spot. It’s certainly one of those places.” Keith turned back to the window.

"It's that mountain range," he said, pointing. There wasn't much to be seen in the sea of haze and smoke from the remains of Gerudo City, but Keith could, at the very least, make out the shapes of distant objects on the horizon.

"Yes," Allura smiled. The bladed plane cut through the black, charred air like a spoon through soup. "Let's hope it still has some of that old world charm and managed to make it through this calamity unscathed."

* * *

They landed the plane in the shallow pond on the southern side of the mountain, sulfur-tinged water lapping at its metal joints. Allura jumped straight in, dress long forgone for a set of clothes that looked more synthetic and suffocating than anything Keith had ever seen before, but he hesitated, hole-littered shoes and threadbare socks inches from the surface.

“It’s not going to kill you,” Allura chirped with the drawn-out twang of royal speech. “It’s just water.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Keith muttered. The surface of the lake bubbled and popped.

“What good are you going to be from all the way up there?” Allura said, propping an arm up on her waist. She started walking toward the shore. “Come on.”

“We should’ve landed in the trees,” Keith said, licking his lips and lowering his foot past the threshold of the bladed plane’s rear hatch into the oily pond water. It was warm - warm like the surface of skin or long-forgotten tea. And it was yellow. “This looks like piss.”

“Language,” Allura said, still walking. “Come on, now. We don’t have all day.”

The sky was red and thick with ash, and the sun carved a lopsided hole in the veneer of smog that settled over the country over the course of the afternoon. Keith ignored the unsettling warmth crawling up his legs, let the flow of the pond water tug him to the shoreline, and met Allura underneath the subtle shade of a browning oak tree.

She took a deep breath and pointed at a crack in the mountainside, wide enough for an automobile to drive through. “It’s just past there.”

Keith froze. He’d seen this place before.

The clouds parted, and the sky was clear - like the reflection off the surface of a calm sea. The shadows behind the rocks whispered away, leaving everything an other-worldly, pastel silver.

There was no more acid lake, no more Allura, no more dying mountaintop and hellfire horizon. There was only the silhouette of a man, cut from the purple shadow of a fading night sky and draped over the gash in Keith’s mind where common sense belonged.

_ Champion. _

Keith stumbled forward, frayed boots catching on the sharp corner of a lakeside rock. His heart rattled around his throat, swimming with the beat of his erratic breath, and he fell - fell, fell, fell toward the ground with barely enough time to throw forward a gently-clasped hand and brace for--

Allura dove in front of him, caught him by the shoulders with a gentle grunt. Keith rolled across her arm and sunk to a knee, lungs straining and sweat dripping down his nose. It pooled in a divot in the stone, and he chased it with his fingers, palms chafing against the rocks.

Allura spun him around, pushed Keith’s matted hair out of his eyes with a manicured fingernail. “Are you alright?” she asked, eyes wide enough to reflect the faded yellow-orange of the sky.

Keith twisted to the side. He swallowed, dumped the pool of bile under his tongue back into his gut where it belonged. “Yeah,” he said. His hair fell forward, and this time he pulled away before Allura could push it back again. “Fine.”

_ Champion, _ the knife whispered.  _ Champion _ .

Keith let out a long breath. He could feel Allura’s gaze cutting divots into his scalp, could feel the way sweat trickled down the troughs of bone behind his ear and dripped into his shirt. “I’m fine,” he repeated, but when Allura didn’t say anything, instead rising to her feet and dusting off her pants, he realized she’d figured out he was saying it more to himself than anyone else.

“Let’s keep moving, then.”


	2. Chapter 2

He was dreaming, riding the line between reality and something else.

The stone creature dropped him on the shore of a low sea, let his body slide into the water and float there, inches above the ocean floor. The waves calmed and he drifted, wind whipping against the exposed skin of his face, fabric of his shirt cutting divots into the rough sand. 

Then he was sinking, face submerged, eyes blurring until all he could see were thin, star-shaped smudges in the night sky. But then even those disappeared, and Shiro was alone, alone, alone…

Until he wasn’t. Until he wasn’t, and the bottom of the ocean was less lonely than the bottom of the earth. 

_ Champion. _

* * *

What they found beyond the mountains stole Keith’s breath and held it away, just out of reach.

First was the waterfall, painted into a crag in the rock like a moving portrait. The mountaintop stretched high above them, cutting the glare of the orange sun into thin shadows and leaving the clearing dusted in the low glow of early evening. 

There was a small grove, brushed with thistle bushes and thin flowers that grew on vines and clung to the tall, weeping oaks in the center. The cares of the world melted away with each slow, quiet call of the evening doves, and the air smelled like lilac and lavender. The clearing was ensconced in a thin layer of fog - just enough to keep the hell of the outside world at bay - and it drifted around Keith’s legs like water as he walked. 

“This is incredible,” Allura murmured. “I never thought such a thing would exist, least of all out west like this.”

“Haven’t you ever been this way before?” Keith asked. “How could someone miss this?”

“This region of Zitara hasn’t ever been particularly inviting,” Allura said, shrugging. “Especially not with Gerudo City so close by.”

Keith stepped over a boulder and dipped his head underneath a low-hanging branch. “It’s easy to say that about anywhere in Zitara,” he said. “Everything’s close to Gerudo City.”

“You’d be surprised,” Allura said in a faroff way, and Keith twisted his lips into a crooked line.

“All my life, I’ve wanted to get as far from that city as possible.” He frowned further. “I really can’t understand why someone would want to run  _ toward _ it, not away.”

Allura paused, reached up to pluck a waxy leaf from a shrub. She rolled it between her fingertips. “The grass is greener on the other side of the fence, I guess you could say.” She huffed out a breath. “Imagine being trapped in that stuffy castle for years. I just wanted something different.”

“Imagine being stuck in the upper floors of one of those skyscrapers for years on end,” Keith said. He turned around and met her eye, shrugging. “It’s different, but I’m not sure it’d be better.” 

Allura pursed her lips and let the leaf in her palm flutter away in the breeze. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, you’re probably right about that.”

They walked through the trees toward a pond, fed by the waterfall by the entrance. They heard the splashing of fish and the low gurgle of frogs along the shore, colors blending with the carpet of algae that ran along the edges of rocks.

Keith’s heart started to race. He looked up, eyes desperate for a horizon, spinning in place when they found nothing to lock on to. There were trees, and a mountaintop, and a lake, but everything else - an entire world of ash and smoke but just as much a  _ world _ as it had every right to be - was gone. Gone, and hidden, and forgotten about like some sort of faded memory.

He felt a hand grace his shoulder. “Keith?” Allura asked.

_ Champion, _ the knife said. 

Keith reached around and grabbed it by the neck, hoping to strangle it into silence with his death grip.

Allura’s hand disappeared, and she stepped backward, boots cutting into twigs like crackling glass. “Did you hear something?” she asked, voice low and careful.

Keith blinked, pulled his knife from his waist, and held it in front of himself, frayed leather wraps peeling away from the handle and dribbling down his hand like melting ice.

“What?” he hissed, staring at it. “What now?”

Allura walked around, appeared in the corner of his eye. “Keith?”

_ Champion. _ The knife’s whisper roared in his ears, rushing over his skin like a storm.  _ Champion. Champion. Champion. Champion. Ch-- _

Keith roared and threw the knife.

He regretted it the moment it left his hand, the wet heat of a sweaty grip leaving behind cold emptiness. It flew through the air, caught the faded off-white light of the sky in the metal of the handle, freshly exposed.

Allura blanched and danced backwards, eyes wide and posture defensive. 

It landed in the lake.

Keith froze - eyes wide, arm outstretched, fingers askew. 

Allura let some slack into her shoulders and huffed, eyebrows furrowed. “What?” she asked. “What the hell was that? Did you see something?”

“No,” Keith murmured. He frowned, tilting his head and stepping toward the lake. 

“You scared me half to death,” Allura continued. “You forget that this is all new to me, too. Don’t go pulling your weapon without telling me what’s going on, because then I’m liable to panic.”

Keith kept walking. He kept his pace slow and resolute, footsteps light on the mud as he approached the lake’s shore.

Another sigh. “What are you doing now?”

“My knife,” he said, crouching low and keeping his arm outstretched like it was frozen in front of him. “I need to go get it.”

“Why did you throw it in the first place?”

Keith stopped walking, looked down. The water was thick with algae and moss, and it lapped at the edges of his frayed boots like a dog. “I don’t know,” he said.

A pause. The birds in the trees behind him stopped singing, and the waterfall, half a forest away, seemed to freeze in time.

“Be careful,” Allura said.

He reached forward, pulled back the sleeve of his jacket, dipped his hand into the water. His fingers fished behind the shroud of green, eyes searching for a glimmer of steel.

He found silver instead. Silver and red.

Keith’s heart stopped.

“There’s a person in here,” Keith said. 

“What?” Allura asked.

Keith stood up straight, eyes wide, back rigid. He blinked. “There’s a person.” He pointed. “Right there.”

Allura bolted, thighs breaking through the water like fallen stones. She dropped her pack on the shore, fell to her knees, used her palms to scoop aside algae. The water stirred a muddy brown, but when it settled, Allura gasped and leaned back on her haunches.

“What in the world,” she muttered.

He was submerged up to his forehead in mud, frayed fiber of his hair drifting with the currents in the pond. It was a bright, unnaturally silver in color, and the skin it attached to was pale and sickly under the water. Keith couldn’t even see his eyes.

Allura took a deep breath, held it, then dipped her hand into the water, fingers burrowing through the mud at the sides of the man’s head. She grimaced when skin touched skin, but forced herself to keep going until she was using Keith’s arm as a ballast and holding her nose above the water as best she could.

She lurched, eyes blowing wide, nails grappling at Keith’s clothes. Her hand was slick with mud when she pulled back.

“He has a pulse,” she said, voice low and warbling. “He has a pulse, Keith.”

The two shared a look. The wind whispered through the trees, but the clearing had fallen silent, hidden shadows dancing like raindrops on the surface of the lake.

Allura moved first, reaching in again to pull at the man’s shoulder. “Grab him under the arm. I’ve got this side.”

Keith dug his shoes into the mud, soot drifting between the open holes of his socks, and reached into the water, meeting Allura’s sharp look with one of his own. He worked around with the tips of his fingers, wet sand catching between his skin and his nails, until he felt the fading warmth of skin and shredded fabric.

Allura started pulling, the man’s arm coming unsubmerged and throwing water into the evening air. His skin was wrinkled and pale, and his fingers were scarred and calloused. 

“What are you doing?” she growled at him, leaning back on her knees and tugging at the man’s shoulder. “Help me!”

Keith reached down further, hands seeking purchase underneath his other side. He frowned, leaned in deeper, felt down the man’s arm--

“There’s nothing here,” Keith said. He frowned, ran his hand back up where his other arm  _ should _ have been, felt his heart drop in his chest when the stubborn rockiness of the sand was replaced by the sticky heat of something else.

“Blood,” Allura gasped. Blood everywhere. In the water, on Keith’s arms, soaking into the white tuft of hair on the man’s scalp. 

Keith stood straighter, heart thundering in his chest, bit back a snarl with his tongue. The man’s blood dripped down his arm, mingled with the pond water, carved trenches in his skin. He leaned forward, growled through his teeth, ignored the building pressure of a headache behind his eyes.

“Keith?” he heard Allura ask, but her voice was cut by the ringing in his ears, the rush of blood in his head. He growled and grabbed the man under his one good shoulder and pulled.

_ Champion.  _ His knife was in his head again.  _ Champion. Champion. Champion. _

Allura was there; Keith could feel her standing next to him, tugging at the part of the man’s waist that had been pulled from the mud. He was losing feeling in his legs. A ring of darkness gnawed away at his vision like a pile of sugar dissolving in boiling water. 

_ Champion _ , his knife said again. The man slid from the mud another inch, another foot, another meter. 

The princess grunted, stepping back onto the shore with one foot. “Keith--”

The man came free from the earth like a newborn baby, water swirling brown and muddied around his legs. Keith fell backwards, body caught by the momentum, the man’s weight in his arms.

A crackle of thunder echoed across the mountaintop, rattling between the trees. 

“Oh,” Allura breathed. “His arm.”

It was missing. The skin of his right bicep was torn and ragged, as if blown off, and covered over the raw meat of his flesh and exposed bone like the flap of a leather pouch. It oozed blood with each slow pump of the man’s heart, and when Keith finally garnered the energy to drag him fully onto the shore, it flopped against the mossy grass with a dull thud.

Keith turned away and narrowed his eyes, running them over his clothes.

Pale. So pale.

“We need to get him back to the plane,” Allura said. She rose, wiped the pond scum from her pants, moved toward the man’s legs. “I’ll carry this side. You get his head.”

Keith wasn’t listening. He pulled his dirty jacket off, stripped out of his shirt, started tearing long strips off the sides and laying them out on the ground next to him.

“No time,” he muttered, bundling the jacket up in his arms and draping it over the man’s soaked, tattered clothes. “No time.”

He took a torn piece of cloth, tied it around the stump of the man’s arm, pulled it as tight as he could manage before his fingers went numb. The blood still trickled onto the grass, seeped into the earth, but it was slowing.

So pale.  _ So _ pale.

He reached around behind him, found a bundle of twigs washed ashore from the low sway of the pond’s current. He tied another rag around the man’s arm, looped a stick through the slack and twisted it, prying the skin closed. The flesh under the fabric turned a sickly black-blue, but the bleeding slowed further, reduced to a slow trickle.

Keith heard Allura’s voice again, heard her call his name, but when he blinked, looked up from his work, she was gone, footsteps carved into the mud leading back toward the gash in the rock that they’d come in from.

By the time he was tying the stick to the man’s arm and holding it in place with the last shreds of his t-shirt, Allura was back, brandishing a small plastic box under one arm and a shiny metal safety blanket under the other.

“What did you do?” she asked, dropping the supplies on the rocks at Keith’s head.

Keith gave her a look. “Stopped the bleeding,” he said, and turned away. He ran a corner of his jacket under the water of the pond and dabbed at the drying blood flaking away from the man’s face.

The trees whistled with the wind, and the smell of a faraway storm drifted in with the sound. Keith still couldn’t see anything past the dense fog that hung between the trees on the edge of the clearing like tapestries, but he knew it was there - knew the world was on fire and they were doing nothing more than hiding from it.

He felt something warm fall over his shoulders and lurched.

“Relax,” Allura frowned, draping the security blanket around him with one smooth motion. “You’ll catch a cold. It’s chilly up here.”

“I don’t need anything,” he said.

Allura gave him an accusatory look. “Hasn’t anyone mothered you before?”

Keith gave her one right back. “No,” he said.

Silence fell between them again, and Keith kept working at a rough spot on the man’s face, worried that if he stopped he’d just panic more. 

No more Gerudo City. No more home. No more shitty job as a dishwasher at the restaurant thirty floors below his shared apartment, no more shitty job as a janitor at the pharmacy two skyscrapers over. No more money, no more food -

“Keith?”

Keith’s fingers clenched into a fist, squeezing the water from the jacket onto the man’s face and down his cheeks. “What,” he bit out.

“You’re going to wear a hole into his skin,” Allura said, voice soft. She pointed at the bridge of his nose. “It’s already raw.”

Keith frowned, leaned in to get a better look. The man’s eyes were closed, locked shut like vices, but there was something else - something hidden on his face underneath a matte of blood.

“He’s been cut,” Keith murmured, tracing a finger along the fine line of a fresh scar.

Allura finished rifling through the first aid kit, pulled out a bag and unraveled it on the beach. “We need to cauterize the arm,” she said, brandishing a fresh emergency flare. “He’s still bleeding.”

“Don’t you have something a bit more…” Keith blanched, “high-tech than that?”

“Oh, please.” Allura grunted and bit off the flare’s cap. It burst to life in the evening air like a beached red sun. “I’m a princess, not a magician.”

The rest of the clearing bled away, torched out of existence from the heat of the flare’s end. Allura held it in her clenched fist like a nightstick, pulled at the makeshift tourniquet Keith had made, lifted the man’s stump arm into the air and off the muddy grass with delicate fingers.

She pressed the flare into his flesh. Keith clamped down his jaw, leaned away from the flicker and the hiss of skin fusing to skin.

Allura grimaced, wiping a bead of sweat from her forehead with the back of her free hand. She pulled it away, dragged it across the fabric of her shirt, used it to pull at the man’s arm so she could get to the part of it that was hidden underneath his bulk. 

And he really was bulky; Keith watched the muscle under his skin flicker and tense with each aching second Allura scorched into his missing arm. He was tall, and square-jawed, and had skin that was charred with ash, like he’d been belched out of the volcano and thrown fifty miles westward.

The smell of charred flesh hit Keith’s nostrils, and he bent over his knees, trying not to gag. He looked over, watched Allura fight through the repulsion etched into her face in harsh red streaks, stole a glance at the man.

His eyes were open.

The light died, and it was over. The clearing began to breathe again, air no longer charged with ozone and nausea, and the fog creeped back in, thin around the edges but thick around Keith's throat.

He scrambled back to his feet, leaned over Allura's steadying hands and pulled at the man's cheek, twisting his neck around further so he could get a better look. There was sweat pouring from his forehead and clumping up the hair on his head, and his nose was flaring with each shaky exhale of breath - but his eyes were still closed, latched shut like they'd been locked from the inside.

The red light from the flare moved, and Allura's fingers flicked past his face, sending it soaring through the air, falling down, down, down until it collapsed into the water and went out with a sharp hiss. The clearing dropped back into the dull brightness of a fading evening.

"My knife," Keith said, blinking.

"What?"

He stood, waded back out into the water, ignored the splotch of red that settled on the surface where they'd pulled the man out and dug around in the mud nearby.

"Just think," Allura said, pulling her legs in and leaning forward, watching Keith come back to shore with his knife in his hands. "If you hadn't thrown it, we might never have found this person." She smiled, light but tired. "We saved someone's life. There's still some good in this world after all."

_ Champion _ , the knife said, and Keith didn't bother responding to either of them.

* * *

They made camp in the trees, Keith lighting a small fire with a spare battery he found powering some bizarre medical device in the first aid kit and the loose wrapper of his last stick of gum. Allura sat between him and the fire in silence, dabbing a cloth over the one-armed man's forehead every few minutes in a sort of hypnotic, mechanical routine.

"We need to talk," Keith said, finally, after the birds stopped chirping and the red sky faded to a muted purple. Allura looked up from her hands, gave him a tired stare, but sighed and nodded when Keith's eyes just narrowed and his fingers carved trenches into the flesh on his biceps.

"Yes," she said. "I suppose we do."

Keith ran his tongue over his dry lips, rubbed his thumbs against his palms. "Why?" he asked. "Why me?"

Allura blinked. "Why not?"

"I was dying," Keith said. He laughed. "Just when I think I'm finally on my own, on my own for  _ real _ , I realize..." He paused, gripped the seams on his jeans between his raw fingertips.

"You realize you're not even strong enough to die on your own," Allura murmured.

Keith let out a breath, tore his eyes away from the line of trees that hid away the horizon. "Yeah."

Allura pursed her lips. "Is that such a bad thing? Maybe it means you still have some fight left in you." She fidgeted. "Maybe it means my bet was a good one."

The mud under Keith's boots shifted, and he twitched. "Your bet?"

The first aid kit wasn’t the only thing that Allura brought back from the bladed plane, Keith realized, watching her dig through a small satchel that she had left slung over her shoulder.

“There’s a lot to go over,” she sighed, thumping her fingertips against the leather bind of an old book. Keith raised an eyebrow.

“I’ve never seen a physical book before.” He looked away, afraid he might cause damage just by leaving his stare on it for too long.

“Really?” Allura asked, pulling out a stack of loose, ash-tinged paper and folding them underneath the weight of book. They drifted in the wind like leaves. She let her hands fall into her lap with a small clap. “That’s surprising.”

“More than everything else you’ve seen today?”

She turned to him, fitted him with one of the most piteous smiles Keith had ever seen. “Honestly? Yes. It really says a lot, doesn’t it?”

Keith narrowed his eyes. “Well,” he started, letting out a rough breath, “I’m sorry I didn’t exactly have the time between my two jobs to bother with finding a physical book. And it’s not like museums are free.”

“No,” Allura said, almost letting out a yelp. “No, that’s not what I meant, Keith. I’m just not,” she shrugged, “used to life outside of the castle, really. I’m learning a lot. I don’t mean to be rude.”

Keith just felt tired. “Yeah. Okay.”

Allura pursed her lips, loose strands of her hair flitting across her face with each silent twitch of the wind. She held her breath for a moment, closed her eyes, then nodded, as if coming to some unspoken conclusion. “I thought I might have met you today, you know.”

Keith looked at her.

“Well,” Allura started, flicking her wrist, “not you. But someone. Definitely someone. In times of need, the ancient land tends to conjure up the most unlikely of heroes.

“I’ve been reading about the events of today for a decade, Keith,” she went on, prying open the first few pages of the leatherbound book. “Looking for clues in history. Because we knew it was coming.” 

Keith looked past the bridge of his nose and stole a peek over her thin fingertips, watching them move across the page in careful, respectful arcs. They were hand-written - transcribed. 

“Did you write that?” he found himself asking, words blurted out before he could reel them back in again and let Allura’s explanation of things answer him in due time. But Allura just smiled, shook her head, and tilted the book further in his direction.

“My father,” she said. “He started it. The first hundred or so pages was translated by his hand and his hand alone.” She bit her lip. “I did the rest. Once he passed, at least.”

Keith nodded. “A family thing, then.”

“Yes,” Allura murmured. “Truly.” She flipped the page, pointed at a faded illustration that had been glued into the empty space between the late King Alfor’s neat, thin handwriting. “There is a legend, Keith. Something that only the royal family has known for the past thousand years.” She blinked, looked Keith in the eye. “You’re the first civilian that’s seen this in centuries.”

Keith leaned forward and pressed his hand to the corner of the page where it was curling and blocking his view, fear of ruination long forgotten. "What is this?"

"This is the way the world ended twenty thousand years ago," she said. "It happened ten thousand years later as well, and now?" She gestured around them, but the effect was largely lost to the fog. "Here we are again."

The photograph was old and faded and crumbled along the edges, but the message was largely still intact. The world would burn, the page said. Burn and be reborn. Mass forests were seas of red hellfire, and the oceans were boiled away to the sea floor. The sky was orange and red and purple and black, and at the center of it all, in the middle of the mass sea of confusion and chaos, there was one man.

"Who is that?" Keith asked, running a finger down the painting's frayed edges. He leaned in closer, tilted the book to get a better angle with the campfire's inconsistent light.

His knife bubbled warmth down his leg where he'd tied it.  _ Champion _ , it said.

Allura paused, put one hand over Keith's and used the other to close the book. "That's you," she said. "That's you, Keith."

_ Champion. _

The fire crackled, and one of the large logs shifted out of place, dumping hot ash at Keith's bare feet. He hissed, leaping up, forcing Allura back and the book to fall closed entirely.

"What?" Keith asked, nearly laughing, dusting off the backs of his legs. "What did you say?"

"It's why I found you," Allura said. "We were meant to find each other."

Keith looked down at her, raising an eyebrow. He scoffed. "Yeah. Because the world needs  _ me _ to save it. A twenty thousand year old me.”

Allura jumped to her feet too, forcing the book under her arm. "It does!" she growled, shoving a finger into his chest. "I rescued your ass back there. I could've kept going, but I didn't. I shouldn't've seen you down there, but I  _ did _ . That's more than coincidence. It's preordained."

"By what?" Keith asked. "The goddess? Hylia?"

Allura narrowed her eyes at him and frowned.

"Wait," Keith said, faltering. "Don't tell me."

"She's real," Allura muttered from behind clenched teeth. "It's not just an urban legend."

"Urban legend?" Keith shook his head and let it fall back against his shoulders, staring up at the trees. "More like crackpot religious cult."

"You haven't seen what I've seen," Allura pressed. "Read what I've read."

"They're a gang," Keith shrugged. He fell back to his haunches, folded his legs underneath himself and saddled up against the fire again. "They have ties to Gerudo City's government." He raised an eyebrow. "They may have been the ones that caused all of this."

Allura scoffed. "I can assure you that's not the case."

Keith stared at the fire. "Yeah."

"Their motives may be wrong,” Allura said, “but the person they say they worship? There’s truth to it.” She tapped her fists against the book. “This is the story.” Her brow furrowed. “Our story.”

He gave her a sidelong glance.

"I understand your hesitance,” Allura murmured. “I was skeptical at first myself. But after all this research, all this planning - it makes sense. And now that the world is falling apart around us, it’s proven nearly all my assumptions to be true.”

Keith frowned, picking up a small broken twig from the ground. He dug a small trench with it in the mud. “Like what?”

“Well, you,” Allura said. “You’re the Champion.”

Champion.

Keith froze.

Champion, the knife repeated.

“What,” Keith asked, “does that mean?”

Allura frowned. “I honestly don’t know. It’s written in the archives, and excavation teams have found it carved into the foundation of the old castle.” She scratched her cheek. “It’s been a bit of a mystery. But I don’t think that matters much.”

Keith’s fingers were clammy, hands loose and dangling between his legs, eyes locked on the flicker of firelight against the frozen face of the man they rescued.

He had never meant anything to anyone. He was a flash on the pan of Gerudo City - a dusting of sand on the ground. He was stepped on, trampled, beaten within the inch of his life, robbed at knifepoint and forced to rob others, too. When he looked in the mirror at night, if the lights in his home's bathroom still worked at the end of the week, all he saw was wasted space. Missed opportunity.

His hands clenched at his side. "Don't talk like that," he said.

"What else am I supposed to believe?" Allura leaned forward, gesturing in front of him. She paused, looked down at Keith's hip. "There," she said, pointing. "Your knife. What is it to you?"

Keith's gut twisted itself into a knot, but he forced a frown. "What, my knife? It's a family heirloom. Something my dad left me when he went and got himself killed."

Allura blinked. "Oh," she said.

"Yeah," Keith muttered. "Oh."

"I'm sorry," Allura muttered, sitting up on her knees, resting her palms across her thighs. "I didn't know."

"It's fine," Keith sighed. "It's been years. Now it's just something that I say when they ask me to tell them about myself."

Allura nodded, face grim, and turned it toward the coastline. The trenches in the dirt carved by the man's solid boots as they dragged him to the trees looked like small canals, and they carried thin streaks of moonlit water across the shore.

"That knife," Allura said. "I've seen it before."

Keith closed his eyes. "That's not possible."

He heard rustling, opened them and looked back over just in time to see Allura rifling through time-faded pages in her ancient notebook. A dozen scrawled pages of handwritten notes later and she found what she was looking for - a drawing. She shoved it under Keith's nose and pointed at it, the thin wedges of her fingernail digging into the page.

"Look," she murmured. "What does this look like to you?"

Keith let his eyes refocus. "It's a sword," he said, raising an eyebrow.

"No." Allura sighed and flitted through another few pages. She tutted in victory and handed the book back. "See?"

It wasn't a knife, nor was it a sword or a blade of any kind. Keith felt his lips part, felt his hands grip the leather binding just a little bit more.

It wasn't a knife - it was a castle wall. Stone bricks stacked up between a hillside and the ocean, arching high, high overhead. Dark shadows of windows hid along the seams of a tall tower, thin and spindly and impossibly built. It looked aged; the waves had lapped away at a band of granite foundation, leaving it charred and uneven like sponge.

Draped down the side, hung with fraying rope and flapping in the wind, was a tapestry.

_ Champion, _ the knife said. It whispered, its voice thin and nostalgic.

There was a logo, carved deep into the unknown metal of the blade's handle. Keith had only seen it once before. It was buried under layer upon layer of gauze and tape and leather binding, hidden from eye by a barrier of personality Keith felt the need to impart despite having nothing of himself anywhere else. Perhaps it was  _ because  _ the knife was all he had that he felt the need to customize it, but the hand-wrapped grip that kept his blade firm in his hand for far too many fistfights was something Keith never felt guilty about.

And yet, when he looked at the picture and saw that same symbol,  _ that same carving _ woven into the fabric of an ancient tapestry, Keith felt like he was besmirching something that was more than him.

"What is this?" he asked.

"An old outpost," Allura murmured. "Built during the second era. This picture was taken early on - most likely very soon after photography itself was invented."

"Is it still there?"

Allura sighed, shaking her head and threading a loose strand of hair behind her ear from where the wind had whipped it out of place. "Unfortunately no," she said. "We've tried our best to find it, but it's been lost to time." She shrugged. "Probably fell into the ocean."

Keith let Allura's grasp tug the book away from him, watched her fold it back up and slide it into the empty space in her knapsack. His hands went for his waist out of instinct, brought the ancient knife up to eye level. He watched the thin outline of his reflection on its surface dance in the firelight.

"This is all I've ever had," he said. "All I've ever been able to keep with me. I burn and bury clothes, lose jobs and friends and money faster than I can make them." He smiled, the haunted image of something that once held happiness carving sharp lines into the skin of his face, and the knife just twisted it - turned it vile. "But at least I've had this."

"And it's yours," Allura said. "Nobody said anything about taking it away from you."

"How did you know, though?" Keith asked, raising an eyebrow. "How did you know this knife had that symbol?"

"Because it's right there," Allura said, smirking, pointing at where the weathered handle had peeled away. "I saw it earlier when you pulled it out of the water."

* * *

Shiro dreamt of cloudless skies.

The air was thick with rain and the ground was wet, dripping with the smell of breathing trees; Shiro had the urge to reach up and flick away a bead of sweat before it drizzled down his cheek and landed in the grass. But he couldn't. The sky was there, all blue and mystic and otherworldly, but he was trapped somewhere else - stuck on the ground on a place that didn't match.

He blinked, sucked in a lungful of air. His chest heaved and his lips dried, but his body - his aching, starved body felt nothing. He tried again, but the feeling was back, like he was drowning. He gasped, falling to his knees, fingers digging into the soil beneath his feet. One of his hands caught his weight, spread it out across the grass, but the other was like sand; it evaporated, crumbled into the ground when he pressed himself against it.

More breathing. More strain. Nothing happened.

He was drowning - drowning on air. The sky was blue, but it was fading - whispering away until all that was left was a thin twinkle of darkness that prickled Shiro's skin. But it wasn't black - not like the night sky or the trenches of the earth.

It was violet. Violet like eyes at dusk - like narrowed eyes, like trusting eyes, like eyes that had seen another world.

Maybe that was why Shiro was there, in the land with a sky that didn't match its earth. Maybe Shiro had to earn those eyes for himself.

* * *

Keith woke to the sound of birds and lapping waves.

There was no screaming. No creaking floors. No rattling of windows or shaking of walls. The neighbor's alarm wasn't going off, and there were no bladed planes to cut sharp trenches into whatever still remained of Keith's sanity.

Instead, he woke to soft grass and a calming breeze and the sight of a dead campfire. Allura was still there, backpack propped underneath her tied-back hair in a makeshift pillow. She slept like a vampire - arms crossed over her chest and face turned skywards - but when Keith looked closer, there was a tension in her brow that wasn't there before. He frowned.

There wasn't anything to eat, but Keith was okay with that. His stomach seemed to take offense, but he ignored it, letting himself fall back onto the grass to stare at the gaps of foggy light that cut through the trees.

He heard something splash in the water.

His hand found his knife before he could think, muscles firing and swinging him upright like a mechanical soldier. He was on his feet in two seconds, ducking for cover behind a tree in three, and staring around the corner as his heart thunder, thunder, thundered in his chest.

There was a man there. A man on the pond's shore.

The knife slipped from his fingertips.

The man jolted, spinning in place, eyes wide and mouth open. There was a carrot stuck between his teeth.

"Oh," he said, letting out a breath. He ran his hand through the mop of white hair on his head, let it linger over his nose just long enough to scratch at a darkening scar.

"How are you awake?" Keith asked, staring. The man stood, stretching his shoulders until Keith heard the joints pop, and winced when the bandages on his stump arm pulled taught. He held it with his free hand gingerly, carrot tucked between his fingertips.

"What do you mean?" He lumbered over, stepped closer but froze when Keith took an equally measured step back. "How does anyone wake up?"

"You were dead," Keith said. "Or about to be. You were leaking blood like a firehose." He stumbled on his words, grunted in frustration, and pointed at the lake. "You were buried up to your face at the bottom of the lake, for fuck's sake!"

The man's eyes went wide. "I was what?"

Keith let his head fall back against the tree he was hiding behind. "I don't know," he said. "I don't know anymore. Everything so fucked up I can't even remember what I was doing two days ago."

The man blinked. "I was working," he said. "In the mines." He shrugged. "Although that's usually a safe bet. I don't do much else."

Keith's mind seized up like a waterlogged engine. "You what?" he asked. "In the mines?"

"Yeah?" the man asked, as though that were particularly outlandish a thought. "What, uh. Do you do? For a living."

"The mines are a hundred miles away," Keith said. "What in the  _ hell _ are you doing out here?"

The man raised an eyebrow. "I could say the same to you."

"What's going on?" a third voice called from the other side of the clearing. From their campsite came Allura, bag strapped to her back and hair pulled back into an aggressive bun. She froze when she saw their previous night's patient, and rushed over, her feet cutting soundless marks into the soil. "What?"

Keith shook his head. "I don't know."

She stopped in front of him, ignored the look of confusion he sent her when she started adjusting his bandages.  _ "How?" _ she muttered, looking at Keith from over the man's shoulder.

"I just woke up," Keith grunted. "I know as much as you do. Honest."

"Is anyone going to tell me why I'm missing an arm?" the man asked. He took a step back and Allura tutted.

"Because that's how we found you," she said under her breath, pulling her bag off her shoulders and pulling out another roll of gauze from a side pocket. "Damn. If I would have known you would be moving around so soon, I would have wrapped this properly the first time."

She started tearing fabric off his shoulders, revealing dark lines that were hidden in the darkness of the previous night. Keith traced them with his eyes, followed them to the stump left behind from whatever had stolen the man's arm. He blinked, looked back in his eyes, startled when he realized the man was looking back at him, too.

"My name's Shiro," he murmured, eyes soft. They looked like fresh charcoal - like something just on the cusp of being tamed. "Forgot to mention that."

"Keith," Keith said. He blinked once, twice, frowned a little. "Yeah. Keith. That's my, uh. My name."

"And I'm Allura," Allura said. She slung a fresh roll of gauze over Shiro's shoulder. She measured out a length and cut it with a thin blade she’d tucked in her sleeve. "Damn, I hope we have enough."

Shiro looked at his arm, winced when Allura started to rewrap it. “I’m really sorry,” he said. “Don’t know what’s going on, but I appreciate the concern.”

Keith pursed his lips. “At least you’re alive.”

“There are worse fates,” Allura agreed, completing another circle around Shiro’s bicep. “Perhaps such as being buried underneath a forgotten lakebed.”

Shiro’s eyes hardened, and they cut a path over Keith’s shoulder at the shimmering surface of the water. “Yeah,” he said, voice low.

“What happened?” Keith asked.

“I don’t know.” Shiro took a deep breath. “The last thing I remember was me finding something buried under Mount Maliro. I called the boss over to investigate, and then…”

He reached up and cupped his forehead with his lone hand, groaning. “What  _ happened? _ ” he repeated. 

“It doesn’t matter now,” Allura said. She tied a knot in the gauze and patted it once, twice for good measure. “You’re alive. The same can’t be said for many others.”

“Others?” Shiro asked. He let his hand drop, revealing the concern hung between his eyes.

“You can’t see it,” Keith said, “but the world’s on fire.”

“The volcano erupted,” Allura added, sorting the contents of her bag and buckling it shut. Her book stayed out, and she tucked it under her shoulder when she slung the bag onto her back. “Among other things.”

“I’m from Gerudo City,” Keith said. He scratched an itch on his elbow and looked away. “Something happened with the power station. Earthquake, I guess. The whole city is gone now.”

Shiro’s eyes widened into discs. “Gerudo City? It’s  _ gone?” _ He shook his head. “There’s twenty-five million people there. It’s too big to just,” he gestured with his free hand, “disappear.”

Keith ground his teeth. “I was  _ there _ , he said. “I escaped.”

“Barely,” Allura murmured. She brushed a hair behind her ear.

Shiro let out a long, careful breath. “Gerudo City,” he said. “It’s gone. Just like that?”

“Just like that,” Keith said. He closed his eyes and let his head dip forward. “It’s only been a day, but it feels like a million.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Allura said. She stepped forward and placed a hand, light but firm, on his shoulder. “We will. For everyone that’s died.”

Keith turned and looked at her, met her smile with something still a little unsure. He turned to Shiro, blinked when he realized he was smiling, too.

“I’m here to help,” he said. “Put me to work.”

Allura’s smile twisted. “And that’s just it,” she said. “I’m confused.” Keith watched her unfold the journal from under her arm, flip through the pages, nod when she found what she was looking for. She turned it toward them. 

It was a full-page spread, a photograph of an ancient painting stapled directly into the book. In the center were two people: one man and one woman. The woman wore a crown, and the man carried a sword. 

“There are three of us now,” she said. “There are three of us when there should only be two.”

Keith and Shiro looked at each other.

“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go,” Allura murmured. She turned the book back around, flipped around some more. “I don’t understand. If this is wrong, and there are supposed to be three people to defeat the evil, then who’s to say more things are incorrect? We can’t simply make assumptions like these.”

Shiro tilted his head, looked at the unmarked cover of Allura’s journal from an angle where he could actually see it. “Where did you get that picture from?” he asked. “Where’s the original?”

“The original?” Allura’s eyebrows raised. “The original!”

Keith frowned. “What?”

“That painting hangs in the King’s study back at the castle,” Allura said. “There might have been something we missed when we first documented it in this journal. Something else that would explain what we should do now.” Her eyes shined in the early morning haze. “We need to be  _ absolutely _ sure.”

Shiro scratched his head. “Alright then,” he said. He shrugged. “Guess that means we’re going to the castle.”


	3. Chapter 3

Keith remembered leaning against the railing of the Financial Center’s one hundred and fiftieth story observation deck, thin loaf of poached bread in his hands, the cold air of a Gerudo desert evening playing games with the goosebumps on his skin. He grunted, stepping aside when a couple dressed in formal wear ran into him, and did his best to look uninterested when the woman shot him a dirty glare over her shoulder.

“Damn homeless,” she said, rolling her eyes. Her voice cut divots into the wind, the words sharp and unwanted in Keith’s ears. “Can’t even escape them all the way up here. How’d he even--”

The man saddled up beside her, took her hand and tugged her to the far wall. “It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll call security.”

Keith sighed, gnawing on the corner of his bread and frowning when it came back stale. He only had a few moments left to himself before the Financial Center’s police force would storm the observation area and drag him out by his ankles, but he was used to that - was used to taking advantage of whatever time he could.

The nauseating expanse of Gerudo City stretched out in front of him like a neon disease, all jagged edges and needle-thin skyscrapers. Keith could make out the bundled-up silhouettes of tourists in other towers’ observation decks, each just as ritzy and just as unpleasant. A burst of cold air shucked the heat off the balcony, and Keith bit his tongue. At least he could take comfort in the knowledge that unexpected cold affected all men equally.

The sky was as dark as it ever got, a hazy brown-grey that hung between the mountains to the north like a dirty rag. Mount Maliro carved up the horizon further still, and in between sat an endless expanse of darkness - a hidden world.

And sat in the middle of it all, a bulb of yellow-gold light like the tip of a lit candle, was the Zitaran Capitol - a castle older than even the most historic building in Gerudo. He could count the towers, could trace the curtain walls with his eyes, but the rest of it, the world that set just past the gates, only existed in the fables Gerudo City children spread among themselves like measles or the common cold.

Keith looked away, took another disappointing bite out of his dinner, watched the sun set an hour early behind the walls of steel and glass.

He wasn’t sure why he bothered sneaking up to the rooftops, staring out over the city that never looked down at its own feet. Maybe Keith was tired of the dirt and grime and sea of derision that caked itself over the city streets like chewing gum; maybe he just wanted something more interesting than overturned dumpsters and burned-out automobiles to watch while he ate.

He turned back around, staring at the doorway to the staircase that would soon enough mean his hasty departure. The concrete wall stretched up another fifteen feet, terminated in a massive bundle of antennae and radar dishes that flashed red with each steady pump of blood through Keith’s veins.

His eyes shifted; he watched the couple from before, watched the woman fold herself underneath the man’s arm. They were facing the skyline, the woman’s hair whipping against her overcoat, each of their faces turned away and haloed by the low glow of the neon lights below. A moment of peace in a world with very little; an instance of good outside of the bubble that Keith lived in. His heart ached.

When security arrived, pulling Keith back toward the elevators and to the filth of the ground floor, he was staring back out into the wilderness, watching the morning fog soften the lights of the castle’s walls.

* * *

Shiro, as it happened, barely fit into Allura’s bladed plane.

“There’s enough room in the back,” she said, sliding open the hatch between the rear and the piloting module. She gave Shiro an embarrassed smile from where he stood just outside on the grass. “I don’t think these things were quite meant for anyone other than skimpy Capitol City flight engineers.”

Shiro shrugged, returning her smile. “That’s fine,” he said. “I’ll sit back here.”

Allura slid into her seat and flipped a few switches, and the engines came alive with low rumbles and a high-pitched whine. She gave Keith a pointed stare, shrugged in the direction of the copilot’s seat.

“I’ll stay back here, too, if that’s okay,” Keith said, crossing his arms. “I don’t know what I’d be doing anyways.”

Shiro stepped inside, neck bent nearly perpendicular as he felt his way toward the pair of cots in the back. The plane’s doors slid shut with a hiss, and Allura turned around one last time, looking over her shoulder.

“I guess not all three of us would have been able to sit in one place at once regardless,” she said with a shrug, pulling the hatch shut behind her. 

Keith settled himself on his seat from the previous day, dusting off the edges from where the desert sand had seeped from his clothes. He stumbled when the plane lurched forward, inertia tugging at his gut. 

“Hey,” Shiro said, leaning against the wall from where he’d seated himself on Allura’s bed. “Thanks. You didn’t have to stay back here.”

Keith shrugged. “It’s no biggie.”

Shiro chuckled - it was a low sound, caught in the back of his throat and hidden behind a veneer of unease. “Well, I would’ve understood if you’d done it. You two know what you’re doing. I’m just...” he gestured around him, pointing at the wall of boxes pinned against the floor by elastic straps. “Cargo.”

“No,” Keith sighed, running a gloved hand through his hair. It was slick with sweat and grease; he winced and did his best to wipe his fingers off on his pants. “I’m just as clueless as you are.”

Shiro frowned. “Really?” He tilted his head to the side, fixed Keith with a strange look. “Then what are you doing here?”

Keith opened his mouth, let it click shut again when he realized he didn’t exactly have an answer.

“I guess because I’ve got nowhere else to go,” Keith said, settling on something that, upon reflection, was exactly the truth. He bit his lip, let his arms dangle between his knees. “I have no idea what Allura is planning, but--”

The plane rose off the ground and sent Keith’s stomach into his legs. He jerked, lifting his head a little too quickly, and the back of his skull cracked against the steel plating of the plane’s hull. A bubble of nausea crept into his throat - an itchy, unpleasant fullness that tickled its way up his chest. His eyes went wide, and he clutched his chest.

“Hey,” Shiro said, reaching out with a hand, thinking better of it and stopping halfway. “You okay?”

Keith winced, falling over a bit before reaching over with a hand and bracing himself against the metal rails of the cot. “Yeah,” he breathed. “Sorry. I’m not used to flying.”

The engines throttled up to max speed, and the metal cots shifted toward the end of the plane. The straps holding down the boxes snapped taught, and Keith groaned.

“Just focus on me,” Shiro said. He reached forward again, this time with far less hesitation. “Give me your hand?”

Keith frowned down at it, watched the fingers dance in the air with each lurch of the plane. He closed his eyes, reached out with intuition, let his hand grip Shiro’s in an attempt to ignore the bile collecting in his mouth.

“Let me show you something,” Shiro said. There was a smile in his voice. Something small. Something reassuring. “I learned this a long time ago.”

He moved his hand to the webbing between Keith’s index finger and thumb and pinched.

Keith opened his eyes again. “What?” he asked, furrowing his eyebrows. He looked down at Shiro’s hand, looked back up into his eyes, blinked.

“It’s a pressure point trick,” Shiro said. The corners of his lips curved. “Something I learned after eating too much spoiled food as a kid.”

Maybe it was the pressure, or the fact that the plane had leveled out, or maybe it was something else - but as Keith felt his stomach settle and the world go sweet with comfort again, he had a hard time convincing himself it was anything other than Shiro’s eyes.

* * *

“Nice flying,” Shiro said when Allura stumbled out of the cockpit and back into the bladed plane’s hold. 

“Thanks,” she smiled, popping her neck. “Was a bit hairy there for a bit. Cloud cover is thick.”

Shiro and Keith shared a look, but Keith just closed his eyes and smiled, shaking his head.  _ It’s fine. _

“We’re on our way back to the castle,” Allura continued, folding herself into a sitting position on the floor between them. “The plane’s computer should get us there by early afternoon.”

Keith blinked. “That soon?”

“Zitara isn’t that big,” Shiro said, shrugging. Probably only takes a day or so to hike across it.” He frowned. “Back in the day, at least.”

“Back in the day, people just rode horses,” Allura shrugged.

Keith’s eyes lit up. “Horses?”

“Yes,” Allura said. She tilted her neck, looking up at him. “Have you never heard of a horse before?”

“No, I have,” Keith said, running a hand over his neck. “I’ve just never. You know. Seen one before.”

Allura’s mouth fell open, but she disguised it as a cough and rose to her feet again. Shiro raised an eyebrow at her. “Well,” she said, dusting off her pants, “I guess I’ll head back to the front. Make sure things are going okay.”

Keith listened rather than watched her leave, instead choosing to fixate on a loose strand of thread from where the cot sat underneath his legs. The cockpit door clicked shut, and all that was left of the bright light of the outside world came through thin slits of glass along the top strip of the plane’s ceiling.

“You okay?” Shiro asked, voice quiet. Keith smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “Doing alright.” He looked across the plane, watched the way Shiro twisted his empty shoulder blade. “How about you?”

“I’ve been worse,” Shiro said, and he winced through a weak smile. “Believe it or not.”

“Unless you’ve got a really convincing prosthetic under those pants,” Keith smirked, “I don’t think much can compare to losing a limb.”

“You’d be surprised,” Shiro said, letting out a slow breath, the tension in his shoulders sliding through his body into the cot. His eyes lit up a little, and Keith felt himself melt. “And do I really look like the type of person that can afford a prosthetic? I can barely pay for my rent.”

Keith let his head fall a little to the side, too tired to care. “There’s plenty of body modification parlors in Gerudo City.”

Shiro shook his head. “As hard as it was for you to leave the city,” he said, “it was just as difficult for us outsiders to get in.”

Keith eyed Shiro’s loosening bandages. “Maybe when all of this is said and done,” he said, “you can get that fixed.”

“Ah yes,” Shiro said, laughing. “That new appendage smell. Can’t get enough of it.”

Keith pursed his lips. “How was it?” he asked. “Living outside of the city, I mean.”

Shiro’s face twisted into a half grimace, half smile. “It wasn’t so bad,” he said. “I lived at the base of the mountain in a little mining community. There were enough people there for it not to feel like I was all by myself.” His eyes flitted up and met Keith’s. “How about you?”

“Kind of the opposite,” Keith said. “There were so many people that it was hard to find a place to fit in.” He fidgeted on his cot. “At the end of the day, you either lost your mind trying to carve out a little space for yourself to feel human, or died trying.”

Shiro looked down at his free hand, flexing his fingers in the air. “Yeah,” he breathed. “I can see that.”

* * *

Keith dreamed of something different.

There was no plane. There was no Shiro. There was only green - green of the trees and the grass and the moss that cascaded down the side of the rocks built haphazardly around a silent brook.

He took a step, only to realize he could take steps at all. His body moved without effort, his feet leaving invisible footprints along the shores of a narrow river. Across from him was an impressive mountain, as though the heavens had pulled up on the earth by its strings.

A thick fog bloomed overhead; Keith strained to see the horizon, but just as before, nothing came. Only the haze of cloud cover and the cool breeze of nature met his senses.

Keith followed the stream around the mountain, climbing over roots and branches thicker than he was tall. He wasn’t sure why he was following it - just that he had to. It was something that needed to be done, the mountain to his left and the fog to his right.

The roots raised up, stretched into open archways. There was a platform on the other side - a shallow stone monolith. Keith made his way through. 

“You,” someone called.

Keith’s mind jerked, but his body did not.

He turned, face pivoted toward where he’d come. The forest was empty, frozen in time, glossed over like a fading dream.

“You’ve come,” the voice said. It was quiet - a whisper drifting through the wind, carried along by time. “You’ve come.”

Keith stepped onto the platform and looked up.

It wasn’t a mountain. It was a tree.

* * *

Keith jerked awake to the sound of screaming alarms and red, flashing lights.

“Shiro?” Keith grunted, leaning upright, fighting against the violent shaking of the plane. “What the hell?”

“You fell asleep,” Shiro said, hissing when they hit turbulence and his forehead smashed into the ceiling above them. Boxes broke open, spewing containers of toiletries and food packages into the open space at the center of the plane. “I don’t know what’s happening either.”

_ Champion. _

Keith let out a gasped grunt and dropped to his knees. Warmth stretched up his back and seared pain down his thigh, parallel to his knife. He tore at it with frantic fingers.

“Keith?” Shiro asked, voice a bit panicked. He fell forward to catch Keith, missed when the plane took a sharp nosedive. The lights outside, visible through thin stretches of glass in the ceiling, flashed black and red and black like a bloodied carousel.

_ Champion, _ the knife hissed. Keith let out a cry of pain.

His fingers stopped functioning, locked into claws. The stars behind his eyes bloomed like flowers, sucking away the world and leaving him ensconced,  _ trapped _ by the hissing static between his ears and the agony tearing up his flesh from the inside.

He blinked, felt his body move, lolled his head to the side enough to see Shiro cradling him, eyes wide, hand shaking his shoulder and cupping his face. His mouth was moving, but Keith heard no words.

_ The champion is not who the champion is, _ the knife boomed. Keith recoiled as if slapped.  _ The goddess and the champion and the malice incarnate. The goddess. The champion. The malice incarnate. _

Shiro disappeared, replaced with darkness. Keith struggled, fought against the pressure in his chest and the heat searing across his body.

_ The goddess, _ the knife repeated, spitting down his neck.  _ The champion _ .

“I don’t understand!” Keith hiccoughed, choking on a sob. “What champion!”

_ The champion is not the champion is not the champion, _ the knife wailed.  _ The reclaimer is not the reclaimed! The divinity is not divine! _

The roaring in his head vanished, torn from his skull. The silence, all at once and nothing at all, made Keith gag.

He curled over, drooling bile into his lap, chest heaving. Slowly, like the twinkling of faraway lights, sound returned. The low moan of the plane’s engines stalling. The rapid, frantic burst of alarm bells from the plane’s computer. Shiro, voice in his ear and grip missing from his shoulder.

“Keith, come on, come back,” Shiro muttered, voice warbled. “Come on. Please.”

Keith grunted, spat out the contents of his mouth, let the bumpiness of the plane roll his head back upright.

He saw his knife, buried in a pile of loose equipment, pinned against the far wall of the plane.

“My knife,” he groaned, attempting to stand. Shiro grabbed him by the arm and kept him down.

“Your knife was hurting you,” Shiro said. He shook his head, eyes whiter than starlight and bright like the sun. He was shaking.

One of the plane’s engines cut.

“Fuck!” The cockpit door blasted open, torn aside by Allura’s rage. “This damned heat!” She saw Shiro on the ground and stopped, fingers gripping indentations into the metal of the door’s handle. “Are you two okay?”

“I don’t know,” Shiro said. “Keith… he’s hurt.”

“I’m fine,” Keith grunted. He closed his eyes and breathed. “I’m fine.”

“We’ve only got one engine right now,” Allura said. She narrowed her eyes when another alarm flared to life on the console behind her. “We might have to turn back. I don’t know if this thing can handle the environment.”

“The environment?” Keith asked, wiping his brow, clearing the sweat from his face. “What’s wrong with the environment?”

She grimaced and stepped aside. Keith didn’t need to be in the cockpit to see what was outside the windows.

Lava. Rivers of lava. Ripples of heat cascaded off of what used to be the land of Zitara, trapped in a yellow-red haze of smog and ash. The plane soared through a plume of dark-black smoke and the lone engine choked, rumbling out of rhythm.

“Where are we?” Shiro asked, voice small.

“Just a few kilometers from the castle,” Allura murmured. She braced herself against the frame of the plane, let another shudder shake everything out of place.

Keith braved the motion, lurching to his feet and marching toward the unmanned cockpit.

“It’s flying itself right now,” Allura said, watching him step past her. “Don’t touch anything. I don’t know what might happen.”

_ You’ve come, _ a memory that wasn’t his said.  _ You’ve come back _ .

“I never left,” Keith murmured under his breath. The plane flew over a sea of smoldering trees.

“Left where?” Allura asked, furrowing her brow. “What?”

_ There is an order. A connection between all that is good and evil. _

It wasn’t his knife - it was another voice. A different one. Something older than time itself - something from another world.

_ The good and the evil aren’t as they seem. Not all things follow the order - only their connection. _

A headache bloomed behind Keith’s eyes and he pressed his palm to his face. “Where are we going?” he asked. 

“The castle,” Allura said. She raised an eyebrow and crossed her arms. “Why? What’s wrong?”

He ground his teeth. “Where are we  _ really _ going?”

Allura blinked. “I don’t follow.”

“You know something,” Keith muttered. “You know something that you’re not telling us.”

Allura fidgeted. “We can discuss it when everything’s over,” she said, and met his eyes with her own once the words slipped past her lips. They were pleading. Scared. “It’s better that way.”

Shiro leaned in between them. “No,” he said, simply. “We’re not doing that.”

“Allura, please,” Keith said, letting out a burst of air from his lungs. He was tired - so tired. “Just tell us.”

She closed her eyes and turned away, pushing her body into the wall of the plane. The engine sputtered and coughed but held fast; the light outside the cockpit windows disappeared and flashed as they whispered through another cloud of ash. 

“There’s something else,” Allura said. “At the castle.”

Keith blinked and shared a look with Shiro. “What is it?”

“There’s more to the legends than I told you initially.” She winced. “There wasn’t two people in the paintings under the castle, like I said before.” Her eyes flicked to Shiro’s - briefly, momentarily. “There were three.”

Shiro froze.

“The malice incarnate,” Keith said. Allura lurched.

“How did you know that?” she breathed, eyes blown wide.

The knife was back in his ear, whispering from across the plane. Keith couldn’t hear what it was saying.

“There is an order,” Allura said, shaking off the surprise. “A way things were done. For millennia. We aren’t any different.”

“What are you talking about?” Shiro asked.

“There are three heavenly agents.” Allura swallowed. She held her hand to her chest. “There is the princess.” She moved it, pointed it in Keith’s direction. “The hero - the princess’s champion. The savior of the world.”

Keith’s stomach dropped. “No,” he said, shaking his head, letting out a laugh. “Oh, no. No way. I’m not doing anything.”

“There is a third option,” Allura spoke up, voice sharp, cutting him off. “The last of the agents.” Her eyes flickered between Keith and Shiro. “The malice. The evil one. The doombringer.”

Shiro took a step back.

“You’re kidding,” Keith said, letting his head fall back. The plane jerked, but held its course. “You really think it’s him?”

“No,” Allura said. “I don’t know what I think anymore.” She pointed at both of them - one narrow finger for each. “It could be either one of you.”

She moved a hand toward the window, pointing into the red-hot lava outside. “Or, more likely, it is outside, waiting for us amongst this hell it created.”

The plane lurched, and an alarm wailed on the cockpit’s main console.

“We’re here,” Allura said.

The knife hissed in his ear, like the low rumble of television static or the dusting of intermittent rain. Keith gripped the side of his head.

Allura ducked aside, slid back into the pilot’s seat. “I’m taking us down.”

* * *

The castle was hidden in a cloud of purple-black ash, swirling in a vortex that stretched high, high into the air above the rest of the ash and smog. In the distance, the smoldering, red-tipped silhouette of Mount Maliro peaked out from beside the storm of red that dusted the rest of the continent, but strangely, a gap existed between the two - a clear path that sat over arid ground as if there was no air at all.

Allura set the bladed plane down on a plateau of scorched earth, watching the purple cloud twist in the center of the storm’s eye, flickering and flashing with electric charge. 

“This is it,” she murmured. “I can’t imagine what must be going on inside.”

Keith could make out the basic shape of the castle from behind the smoke, but that was all he saw - it left everything else to his memory and fading imagination. He sighed and stepped back from the plane’s console, letting Allura squeeze out of her chair and straighten herself.

“There’s no telling what we could find down there,” she said, dusting herself off. “The lava flows from Mount Maliro didn’t look like they’d come this far, but that was just what I saw from the surface.” She frowned. “Who knows how bad things are at this point.”

“We should make this quick,” Shiro said, leveling his eyes toward the castle. A layer of muck and ash had built up around the ridges of the windows, leaving them partially obscured. “Don’t want to end up trapped in the castle’s catacombs - or worse.”

Keith tightened his grip on himself. Allura tapped a few buttons on a dim screen next to the door and frowned.

“The air isn’t toxic,” she said. “Not right now, at least.”

“Is there breathing protection in one of those boxes?” Shiro asked, pointing at the pile of half-opened containers with his hand.  

Allura’s lips thinned to a fine line. “Unfortunately not,” she said. “I was in a bit of a hurry when I took this plane. Didn’t have time to strategize.”

Keith watched her reach back into the cockpit and tuck her journal, all leather-bound and secret-filled, under her arm. He narrowed his eyes but said nothing.

“Oh!” Shiro said, spotting something. He followed where he was pointing and grabbed Keith’s knife from where it had been submerged in a pile of food tins. He turned and held it out in his palm. “Don’t want to forget this.”

Keith eyed it, biting his lip. “Yeah,” he said, taking it. He tried to hide the shaking in his fingers, but by the look in Shiro’s eyes, it didn’t work. “Thanks.”

The lighting in the plane changed, and all at once, the fresh, recycled air was sucked out and replaced with stale, burnt, acrid ash. The wind rushing past the open door dulled Allura’s voice. “Let’s go,” she said. “No time like the present.”

The ground outside the plane was packed flat and thicker than concrete, a solid sheet of burned soil that carried the sound of Keith’s hesitant footsteps through the breeze.

Shiro coughed and pulled his shirt over his face, grimacing. “I thought you said the air was okay to breathe.”

“I said it wasn’t toxic, not that it was particularly pleasant to be in,” Allura said, and she coughed, too. Keith felt the itch in his throat, the screaming, carnal desire to let his body purge what didn’t belong, but another part of him felt alive.  _ Different.  _ It revelled in the burn, took his past and his dreams and coiled them around his anxious heart.

He was there. He was standing at the foot of the Castle of Zitara. It wasn’t the best of circumstances, but if Keith was honest with himself, it never was. He smiled.

The plateau stretched for a few yards to their left and right, fell away behind them where the bladed plane had landed. Massive, blood-black trenches stretched between them and the rest of the earth around the castle, chased by the storm clouds that reminded Keith that the world had, in fact, ended.

They kept walking. Keith covered his nose with the sleeve of his jacket, grimaced when he realized it still smelled like pond scum. He kept the other hand on his knife, tucked into the front pocket of his jeans, its home on his belt forgone from their rush.

His eyes dipped down, watching the exposed handle twinkle from below his arm. Even in the dull, red-hued light of early evening, the blade flickered - a little purple, a little teal. It felt raw - powerful. Otherworldly.

_ Tradition, _ the dream said. Keith winced, letting the memory play.  _ It binds us. Keeps us on the correct path. _ He took another step.  _ But there is more to history than tradition. More than prophecy. Sometimes, the world changes. The way we respond must change as well. _

_ Long ago, _ Keith remembered the tree say,  _ there were great beasts that protected this land. They helped the hero - brought the champions closer together. You may not see them, child. But know: they are there. _

He turned his head, watched Shiro behind him, turned back and watched Allura, too.  _ Flesh, _ the dream said,  _ is not always flesh. Earth is not always earth. They are one entity in the eyes of the divine - one agent. _

Keith winced. Nothing was making sense. The tree from his dream spoke in riddles - but they weren’t exactly riddles, were they? Just statements of things that were to come. But Keith didn’t have the context. There wasn’t enough to go off of. He was just a city kid. He wasn’t prepared.

Something in Keith’s gut curdled. He didn’t need an education to predict they were walking into a trap.

* * *

Allura met the edge of their plateau quicker than expected; she let out a grunt of surprise and leaned down to pick at the stone cliffside.

“Damn,” she said. She pulled back her hand, rubbed red dust between her fingertips. “This isn’t right. The castle should be just up ahead.”

“But it’s not,” Shiro said. He frowned. “Why did you land us here anyways? Rather than  _ in _ the castle?”

Allura turned away. “The plane wouldn’t let me,” she said, all too quickly.

“You’re expecting something to happen,” Keith murmured. Allura’s eyes flew to his.

“Of course I’m expecting something to happen,” she said. “Something  _ has _ to happen. That’s why we’re here.”

“But why  _ are  _ we here?” Keith asked, frowning. “Why this place in particular?” He narrowed his eyes. “And why the lies?”

Allura’s hand raised, all too slowly, and gripped the binding of her notebook. “I was scared,” she said, whispered words hanging in the sulfur air. The wind died down, and it was just the three of them - the three of them and a pillar of fire and ash that stretched out of eyesight.

“Scared?” Shiro asked. “Of what?”

“Of things not going according to plan,” she said, screwing her eyes shut. “There was an order I had to follow. A ritual I needed to understand and carry out. Once I realized it had started, I had no other choice.” She shook her head. “I never should’ve paid for that excavation,” she murmured. “I was so foolish.”

Shiro’s eyes slammed open. “Excavation?” he asked, voice faint. “You? You were the one that hired my company? Forced me to dig for…” he twisted his hand in a fleeting gesture, “whatever the hell we found?”

Keith frowned. “What  _ did _ you find?”

“I don’t know,” Shiro said. He looked at the ground. “It… didn’t make any sense.”

“It was why we found him where we did,” Allura muttered. “In the pond. The reason he’s alive.”

She turned, looked Keith in the eye. “It was a divine beast.”

Keith’s heart skipped a beat. The roar of the wind flared up again, and with it came the voices - the sea of sounds and static that rumbled through into his mind where the blade cut shallow, pressured divots into his skin.

“It put Shiro where it knew we would find him,” Allura said, eyes wide, smile wider. “It saved him! It proved I was right all along. There  _ is _ an order to the way things must go!” She pointed at him. “He’s important. That’s why he was saved!”

Keith winced and bent forward, pressing his palm into the hilt of his knife, trying to silence it. “Are you sure?” he whimpered, seizing when it only burned hotter in his hand.

Allura’s eyes trailed down his arm. “It’s happening now,” she breathed. “The sword knows what’s coming next.”

“Keith?” Shiro asked. Keith ignored him.

_ Wrong,  _ the knife growled.  _ Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong-- _

_ “ _ You’re wrong,” Keith bit out, eyes squeezed shut. The skin on his fingers was boiling, sealing into the metal hilt. He repeated the words, mouthing along with the chanting inside his head. “You’re wrong.”

The wind started spinning faster. Allura’s hair, what little of it lay unkempt and pulled free from her bun, twisted around her head like a noose. Shiro stumbled back, caught off balance from the lack of an arm. 

_ Choose, _ the knife cooed into Keith’s ear.  _ Choose. Choose wisely. _

“What am I choosing?” Keith said. He fell to his knees. The nausea was back, crawling up his stomach like a thousand ants. He gagged and fought back tears.

More wind. More noise. It howled, spinning faster and faster; the storm clouds on the outside of the eye were whipping past like steam trains, lit up by lightning and reflected sunlight caught in the ash.

“You are the hero,” Allura called out, barely above the storm. The walls were closing in on them, shrinking in toward the center spire. “You must do as the hero has always done!”

The ground started rumbling, shaking underneath Keith’s knees. The winds were thrashing against them, coming in pulses of screeching, howling power. He pulled himself inwards, gripping his legs, trying to ride out the waves, but he could feel his body slipping - feel himself being pulled toward the crack in the earth.

Allura was next to him, fallen to the ground and gripping at nothing with her bloodied fingertips. She looked past him, looked toward the castle, and the color drained from her face.

“Keith,” she said, but he could only recognize his name by the shape it left on her lips.

The knife was burning, still burning. Keith couldn’t feel it anymore. The voices in his head were singing, chanting some unspoken chant.

He rolled, let his face press into the earth, turned to see what Allura was pointing at. His vision was spotty, fading in and out, and the sounds of the wind and the thunder whispered away in favor of high-pitched, comfortable ringing.

But Keith did see, just before blacking out, that the purple pillar of smoke had vanished - and that the only thing in the castle’s place was a crater in the earth full of lava and ash.

* * *

“You’ve come,” the tree said. Keith froze. “You’ve come back.”

The clearing was bright and otherworldly, tucked away in the silence of Keith’s imagination. He stood atop a stone pillar, feet rooted in place, eyes searching for something in the fossilized tree that told him it was alive.

“I never left,” he heard himself say - but it wasn't him. Wasn’t  _ actually _ him.

“Indeed,” the tree replied. “You have always been here. Just as you always will.”

Keith’s body turned, and his foot, covered in a boot that wasn’t his, dusted away a mound of leaves and dead grass. He was searching for something.

“Tradition _ , _ ” said the tree. “It binds us. Keeps us on the correct path. But there is more to history than tradition. More than prophecy.” 

Keith’s foot struck something - a rock, jutting out of the stone.

“Sometimes, the world changes. The way we respond must change as well.”

“I’ve heard these things before,” Keith’s voice said, but it wasn’t Keith’s voice. Not really. It was twisted - morphed in a way that he couldn’t understand. But the words rang true in his head all the same.

“Yes, you have,” the tree said. Keith bent over to examine what he had found. “But there is more to you than your physical self. There is reason to be repetitious.”

“There are more of me?” Keith’s voice said. “Others?”

“Flesh is not always flesh.” A breeze caught the branches in the low trees, and the clearing sang like rainfall. “Earth is not always earth. They are one entity in the eyes of the divine - one agent.”

“We are all one in the same,” Keith breathed, seeming to agree. He stood, looked back at the tree. The fog on the horizon was thick and bright, like cotton candy.

“There are things you must know,” the tree said. “Things that bear repeating.”

Keith nodded. “Yes,” he said.

“Listen carefully, then,” said the tree. “Long ago, there were great beasts that protected this land. They helped the hero - brought the champions closer together.” It made a sound - something earthy and hollow. A laugh, Keith realized. “You may not see them, child. But know: they are there.”

“The divine beasts,” Keith’s voice breathed. “Are they not but machines?”

“No,” the tree said. “They are more. Much like you and I - something that exists out of necessity. Beasts of all types will aid you, in just the same way your journeys will be of all types as well.”

Keith frowned, and the tree sensed his confusion.

“There is an order,” it said. “A connection between all that is good and evil. The good and the evil aren’t as they seem. Not all things follow the order - only their connection.”

“I’m not quite sure I understand,” Keith said. The edges of the dream began to fade; the blur of the foggy horizon grew.

“You needn’t understand, Princess,” the tree chuckled, and it began to wither away, too. “But there are parts of you - parts that have yet to surface on this world - that will find this tale quite important indeed.”

* * *

“Keith?”

One heartbeat.

“Keith!”

Two. Three.

Something was tugging at his shoulders. Keith rolled, following the motion, confused. His hands were warm.  _ So _ warm. Why should he move?

He opened his eyes, blinked once, twice, let them slide open onto Shiro’s face.

They were still in hell. The world was still ending around them. The eye of the storm had shrunken, and the edges of its walls were whipping and lashing at Allura’s bladed plane, rocking it back and forth, back and forth.

But then there was Shiro. His eyes were wide and his hair was wild, but he didn’t look scared. The bandages on his arm had torn, and strips of red, bloodied gauze haloed him in the wind. He was reaching out, offering his one hand. To Keith.

So he took it.

Searing, white-hot pain blitzed up his side, and he buckled at the knees, half to his feet. Shiro fell forward, caught him over the shoulder, let Keith sob out a cry of pain into his neck.

Shiro pulled him away, just for a moment, and now - now, Shiro looked scared. He could see the clouds swirling in the reflection of his eyes, could see himself. 

“The knife,” Keith said. His eyesight strained, and he felt himself growing weak again. Shiro held him tight by the arm.

They shared a look. Shiro stared at him, stole his breath through his eyes, let him forget the present for just enough time that Keith felt at peace. Maybe that was his intention. Maybe that was his plan. But all Keith saw was Shiro, and for a moment, for a lifetime, Keith forgot the world.

He felt the knife tear away from his hand, and it all came crashing back again.

“Shiro?” he asked, but Shiro was standing, brandishing the knife, standing over him with steel in his eyes. The air went cold - colder than before - and Keith fell backward, the muscles in his chest cramping and hand seizing from the loss of contact.

Shiro ignored him, took a step forward, walked toward the cliffside.

Keith watched him go, confused and locked in place. The plane was gone, now - stolen by the storm. It was getting closer each passing breath of oxygen-starved air.

Allura was there when Keith turned around, leaning over the edge, staring into the swirling hole of molten rock that used to be her home. “It’s not possible,” she murmured, and when she looked up, saw Shiro standing next to her, she closed her eyes and let her face drop to her hand.

“I understand,” Keith heard her say, and his blood ran cold.

“Shiro,” he called, but Shiro wasn’t listening. “Shiro, no. Don’t do anything drastic.”

Fear draped itself over his heart. Maybe Allura was right after all. Maybe there was more to history than just blank fact - more to myth than just lessons. Maybe it was an instruction manual, and Keith should’ve listened. 

Maybe Shiro was the malice after all. 

“Shiro, I understand now,” Allura bit out, leaning up and staring him down the nose. “It was you all along.” She coughed. “You have to do it. You have to.”

Shiro stood still, back straight and eyes level. He turned, looked at Keith.

“Please,” Keith pleaded. “Don’t do this.”

He watched Keith’s adam’s apple bob, watched a small smile grace his face. “I’m sorry,” he said, and threw the knife into the fire.

* * *

The world hadn’t ended before. It had fallen to pieces, crumbled away at the edges, but it was still intact - still functioning. 

It ended,  _ finally _ ended when Keith opened his eyes.

He couldn’t hear - could barely see. The sky was so thick with fire and ash that it filled his entire vision, stretched from one corner of the world to the other. The ground shook, broke apart all around them, cracks stretching like spiderwebs between Keith’s legs. There was no sky. There was no air. It was over.

Keith resigned himself to his fate, and accepted it all over again.

He’d made it, in the grand sense of things. Did what he always wanted to do. Made it out of Gerudo City and found something different at the Castle of Zitara - and different didn’t necessarily mean  _ bad _ . Even now, with a rising plume of erupting lava singing the hairs on his arms and gravity tugging the stray ropes of it back down to the ground. He didn’t need to look up to see what would happen next.

It was over. He’d done it. Saved the world - even if the only world he’d saved was his own.

But there was still Shiro. One man. Some sort of angel, dropped at his feet and pulled from the earth like an early fall harvest. He wasn’t particularly fast, or strong, or brave - not any more so than anyone else Keith had met. But he was brave  _ enough _ . Knew his strength, and took his weaknesses in stride.

There was a certain amount of honesty in Shiro that was strange to Keith. Maybe because of his upbringing did Keith learn to expect the worst.

But it never came. Not this time. Keith closed his eyes and laid back, his face hot from the air and his clothes singing at the edges. 

And nothing came.

Time froze. The heat vanished. A soft, breeze fell over him, stealing away the heat.

It was nighttime.

Keith bolted upright, chest heaving. He curled onto himself, letting the growing pools of sweat on his skin condense and drip down his face.

He heard murmuring behind him, twisted his back to look, grunted when he realized how stiff he was. It was dark and clear and the stars were out, and for a moment, Keith wondered if anything was real.

“Keith!” he heard instead, and no - no, this was real. 

Allura was there, rising to her feet, silhouette framed by the flickering yellow light of a small campfire. Behind her was the dark shape of the bladed plane, hidden by shadow. She smiled.

Shiro was there, too, but he wasn’t by the campfire. Keith watched him bolt upright, call out, scramble to his feet and cut divots into the earth with his rapid footsteps. 

“Are you alright?” he asked, offering a hand once Keith had unfolded himself and wiped away his sweat. 

“I think so,” Keith said. He took it and leaned against Shiro, frowning. His legs were still weak. “What happened?”

Shiro smiled. “Look up,” he said.

There were patterns of darkness in the sky, frozen areas where the stars didn’t shine. At first, Keith thought they were clouds, but--

“The lava?” he murmured.

“It solidified,” Shiro smiled. “Something happened when I threw your knife into the fire.” He winced. “Oh. Sorry, by the way.” He twisted his lips. “Something just told me I had to do that. It was important.”

Keith laughed. “I don’t care. It was weighing me down anyways.”

“There was something in that knife,” Allura said. She appeared next to Shiro, gave Keith a soft smile. “Some sort of neutralizer. We must be directly over the center of volcanic activity, because it stopped.” She pointed at Mount Maliro, dormant and silent on the horizon. “All of it.”

“Just like that?” Keith asked.

“Just like that,” Shiro smiled.

Allura fidgeted. “Listen. Keith. I--”

“Don’t worry about it,” Keith said, waving his hand. “You were just trying to do what was right.”

“Yes,” Allura muttered. “I suppose.”

“We’re here,” Shiro said. “We made it.” He winked at Allura. “Maybe that prophecy was true after all.”

“I think so, too,” Allura said. “But just in a way that none of us could have expected.” She pointed at Shiro. “I never would have pinned you for the hero.”

Shiro raised an eyebrow. “Well, Keith  _ was _ the one that was carrying the knife after all these years.”

“Maybe we just got the order wrong,” Allura sighed. “And in retrospect, it makes sense that I would be the malice.”

Keith narrowed his eyes.  _ Flesh is not always flesh. _ “I don’t think you were.” He blinked. “Or are, for that matter.”  _ Earth is not always earth. _

“What do you mean?”

“I think in this case,” Keith said, “nature deserves that title.”

“I don’t think that’s possible,” Allura said, but snorted. “Not like that’s meant anything before.”

* * *

“What do we do now?” Shiro asked, watching Allura pry open the door to the bladed plane.

“Try and get this blasted thing to work again,” she grumbled, slipping through the gap she’d managed to make between the plane’s panels. “I’m going to see if it’s still got power. That storm really did a number on things.”

“Alright,” Keith said. He was still leaning on Shiro. “We’ll wait out here.”

Shiro looked down at him and smiled. “Think you can manage to walk yourself?”

Keith looked away. “I don’t know,” he said, tactfully. “I guess I can try.”

He took a step, then another, moonlight illuminating the shake in his boots. When Shiro let go, the world flipped, and Keith’s stomach twisted itself into knots.

“Shit,” he grunted, stumbling backward. Shiro just laughed and caught him before he could fall.

“Here,” he said, reaching around and cupping Keith’s hand in his own. He threaded his fingers path Keith’s and pinched, gently, just above the thumb.

Keith’s heart sped up. He still felt sick. “Thanks,” he said quietly.

“I should be thanking you,” Shiro said, and Keith could hear the smile in his words. “I don’t think I would be alive if it weren’t for you.”

“You’re missing an arm, though,” Keith said, snorting. “Can you really call that living?”

“Well, I’m sure once Gerudo City comes back, you can show me around to all those body modification parlors you were talking about,” he teased.

Keith made a fake gagging sound. “God, do you really think Gerudo City’s gonna rebuild itself?”

“I’d be surprised if it didn’t,” Shiro laughed. The sensation drifted through his ribcage into Keith’s, and Keith shivered.

“Cold?” Shiro asked. He hugged tighter.

“A little.” Keith furrowed his eyebrows. “Hey, why was I still laying all the way out there when I woke up? Don’t you think that could have been dangerous?”

Shiro laughed again, and it made Keith’s legs go weak for an entirely different reason. “You wouldn’t let me pick you up,” he said. “Kept thrashing in your sleep.”

“Oh,” Keith said, and he bit his lip. “Yeah. I sleep like that sometimes.”

The plane roared to life in front of them. The engines sputtered and coughed, and a sea of black smoke shot out the back, clearing the air intakes. Allura threaded the throttle and it whirred back to life, perfectly functional.

“What are we doing now?” Keith asked. He fidgeted in Shiro’s grasp, and the man let him go, watching him take a few careful steps of his own. “I don’t exactly have somewhere to go.”

“Me neither,” Shiro said. Keith turned to respond, but Shiro was there, eyes black and shiny in the night sky like mirrored stars. He rubbed his neck, bashful. “I guess we’re all going to play it by ear from now on, huh?”

Keith kissed him.

It was a quick motion, fed by the stumbling of his feet when he moved to take a step, but Keith didn’t mind. He pulled back, smirked at the way Shiro’s face froze up and twisted into a grin, and kissed him again.

There was a future there. A future that wasn’t caught in indecision or reliant on too much going right. Keith was fully aware of how lucky he was, even with the hardship. But that just made things taste that much sweeter - Shiro’s lips and all.

When Keith leaned away and pulled open the door to the plane for the two of them, he realized he felt more at home in the post-world apocalypse than he ever did before. 

He smiled and tugged Shiro along, inviting him into his future. “I guess so,” he said, and meant it.

**Author's Note:**

> Huge, huge, HUGE shoutout to dork-sen, my artist for the event. Check out their art **[here](http://dork-sen.tumblr.com/post/177602554562/heres-my-piece-for-endoplasmicpandas-fic)** \- it's fantastic!!
> 
> A special thanks as well to my fabulous beta and cheerleader, **[MaethoMixup,](http://archiveofourown.org/users/MaethoMixup/pseuds/MaethoMixup)** for kicking me in the pants and getting me to actually commit to this project. It's a bit embarrassing how many times this thing nearly ended up in the trash.
> 
> I'd also like to say thanks to **[abyssiniana](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Abyssiniana/pseuds/Abyssiniana)** and **[museaway](https://archiveofourown.org/users/museaway)** for checking to make sure things were in ship-shape!
> 
> And finally, a special thanks to YOU for reading!!
> 
> [ **[Check out my other Sheith WIP, Geartooth!](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13184613) | Come say hi on [Tumblr!](http://endoplasmicpanda.tumblr.com/) **]****


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